There is a specific image I have redrawn more times than any other: a long line of creatures moving through a street at night, in no order, in no hurry, going somewhere they are not going to explain. It is called the Hyakki Yagyō, the night parade of a hundred demons, and it is one of the great images in any tradition. It is also the reason a surprising amount of what we now consider classic yokai design looks the way it does.
The rule of the parade
The premise is simple and absolute. On certain nights, the yokai come out and process through the streets. Anyone who sees the parade does not survive it. That is the whole thing, and the economy of it is a large part of why it lasted.
What makes it work as an image rather than as a threat is the composition. It is not an army and it is not an attack. It is a procession — creatures walking, ambling, carrying things, some of them clearly enjoying themselves, none of them in formation, none of them paying the slightest attention to the viewer. The horror is entirely in the indifference. You are not being hunted. You have simply seen something that was not for you.
The medieval versions survive as handscrolls, which is a format that suits it perfectly: you unroll it section by section, so the parade genuinely arrives, passes, and continues past the edge of what you can see.
The best joke in Japanese art
A large fraction of the creatures in those scrolls are household objects that have come to life. A koto with legs. An abandoned umbrella with one eye and one foot. A cooking pot with a face. Sandals, lanterns, folding screens, all animated and all having a marvellous time.
There is a tidy folk logic behind it: a tool that reaches a great age acquires a spirit. Which is, when you look at it directly, a story about guilt over throwing things away — the discarded objects of a household coming back, en masse, in the night, and pointedly not needing you.
It is also extremely funny, and the artists knew it. Those scrolls are full of visual gags. This is a tradition entirely comfortable with a terrifying procession that is also a parade of resentful kitchenware, and the refusal to choose between the two registers is exactly what I like about it.
One man standardised it
In the late eighteenth century an artist named Toriyama Sekien produced a series of illustrated books cataloguing yokai — one creature per page, drawn cleanly, with a short explanatory note, in the format of a reference work. It is essentially a field guide to monsters, and it was enormously influential.
Before Sekien there was regional variation and a lot of vagueness. After Sekien there was a canonical picture. A great many yokai that people now regard as ancient and fixed look the way they do because of how he chose to draw them, and some of the entries appear to be his own inventions, slipped into the catalogue among the traditional ones and subsequently absorbed as genuine.
I have complicated feelings about that. He preserved a colossal amount that would otherwise have been lost, and he also froze a living oral tradition into a set of definitive images, and those two things are the same act.
Why I keep going back to it
Practically, because it is the best possible brief. A hundred creatures, no fixed cast, no required style, one rule — they are going somewhere and they do not care about you. You can put anything in a night parade as long as it is walking and it is indifferent.
Emotionally, because of what the parade is actually about. It is a story about the world having business that does not involve you, conducted at an hour when you should not be awake, in a street you use every day. That is a far more durable kind of unease than a monster in a house. The monster in the house is about you. The parade is not, and that is worse.
The version I am working on now is objects rather than creatures, because I have come round to thinking the umbrella with one eye is the scariest thing in the whole scroll. It should not be. It is a cartoon. But it belonged to somebody once, and it does not any more, and it is out walking.
If you go looking, find a full scroll and scroll it sideways rather than looking at a cropped image of the famous section. The format is the point — it has to arrive and then pass. And when you get to the umbrella, look at it for a moment longer than is comfortable and see whether you agree with me.
Come and see what I built out of it 鬼
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