Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien
336
Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien
336Paperback(Annotated)
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Overview
"Such beautiful nightmares — why bother to wake up? Long before Pokémon took to the streets, the Japanese saw monsters everywhere and in everything. Scholarly without being monstrously studious, Sekien's classic compendia of outlandish everyday demons compiled in this one fiendishly clever volume is sure to enchant even the most rational readers (poor misguided souls!) I sleep less now that I recognize the tenjo-name behind the spots on the ceiling." — Alfred Birnbaum, editor/translator of Monkey Brain Sushi
Japanese folklore abounds with bizarre creatures collectively referred to as the yokai ― the ancestors of the monsters populating Japanese film, literature, manga, and anime. Artist Toriyama Sekien (1712–88) was the first to compile illustrated encyclopedias detailing the appearances and habits of these creepy-crawlies from myth and folklore. Ever since their debut over two centuries ago, the encyclopedias have inspired generations of Japanese artists. Japandemonium Illustrated represents the very first time they have ever been available in English.
This historically groundbreaking compilation includes complete translations of all four of Sekien's yokai masterworks: the 1776 Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (The Illustrated Demon Horde's Night Parade), the 1779 Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (The Illustrated Demon Horde from Past and Present, Continued), the 1781 Konjaku Hyakki Shū (More of the Demon Horde from Past and Present), and the 1784 Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (A Horde of Haunted Housewares). The collection is complemented by a detailed introduction and helpful annotations for modern-day readers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486800356 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 01/18/2017 |
| Edition description: | Annotated |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 693,625 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.20(w) x 10.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
Translators Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda have co-authored numerous books on Japanese pop culture, history, and folklore.
Read an Excerpt
Japandemonium Illustrated
The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien
By Hiroko Yoda, Matt Alt
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2016 Hiroko Yoda and Matt AltAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-81875-7
INTRODUCTION
Without knowledge of Far Eastern superstitions and folk-tales, no real understanding of Japanese fiction or drama or poetry will ever become possible.
Lafcadio Hearn Goblin Poetry 1905
This book contains the artist Toriyama Sekien's four illustrated encyclopedias of creatures from Japanese folklore:
Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (1776) The Illustrated Demon Horde's Night Parade
Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779) The lllustrated Demon Horde from Past and Present, Continued
Konjaku Hyakki Shui (1781) More of the Demon Horde from Past and Present
Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (1784) A Horde of Haunted Housewares
The islands of Japan abound with tales of shape-shifting creatures, collectively known as yokai. They are superstitions with personalities, the things that go bump in Japan's night. A few resemble what the West thinks of as demons. Others are humanoid, animal, or plant-like creatures. Many are simply weird phenomena. An entire "sub-species" called tsukumo-gami are essentially haunted housewares — tools, objects, and even articles of clothing with minds of their own. Although tales of the yokai have been passed down from generation to generation since time immemorial, Sekien's four books represent the first mass-produced illustrated compendiums of these wonderfully weird creatures. Groundbreaking in their day, they have continued to inspire in their home country for centuries. This compilation you hold in your hands represents the first time they have ever been available in the English language in their entirety.
Today, Japan is widely hailed as a pop-cultural powerhouse. Gameboys and Playstations, anime cartoons and manga comics. Characters like Totoro, Pikachu, and Godzilla are instantly recognizable icons around the world. Sekien's books, bestsellers from an era long ago, prove that the business of creating and marketing monsters is nothing new in Japan.
Japan's public face of high-tech manufacturing and entertainment is built upon a deeply entrenched foundation of animism and polytheism. Unlike the monotheistic major religions of the West, both Japan's local religion of Shinto and the later import of Buddhism abound with deities. In fact, there's a saying the country is home to some eight million gods (a number intended to represent an uncountable multitude rather than a specific figure). Kami, as divine presences are referred to in Japanese, take a great many forms. Some are worshipped on high; others are more ethereal. But nearly anything, living or not, is a potential vessel for a spirit: the sun, the forests, the terrain, even abstract concepts such as words. There's even, as a popular song goes, a god of the toilet.
That said, it's important to note that yokai aren't Shinto in nature. For one thing, they aren't worshipped or venerated. But they represent another facet of this polytheistic worldview. Unlike the holy gods of the heavenly plane, they actually dwell among us and even interact with us — usually in the form of giving a good scare. In their long history this grotesque menagerie has been known by many names, including oni (ogre/demon), mononoke (strange things), bakemono (transformed things), and ayakashi (spooky things), among others. While all of these words are still in use today, they are more commonly described by a newer catch-all term: yokai.
Sekien was the first to attempt to systematically catalog them. When the first volume of his encyclopedia was published in the fall of 1776, top-knotted samurai still strolled the streets of Edo, as Tokyo was then known, twin swords at their sides. Japan was in the midst of two centuries of self-imposed isolation, all contact with foreign nations harshly regulated and limited to just a few highly restricted ports. But in spite of this quarantine from the rest of the world, Edo was one of the world's largest cities. As the metropolis grew and prospered, so too did its residents, who cast about for new ways to entertain themselves.
One of their favorite pastimes was reading. The combination of advanced printing techniques and a highly literate populace fueled the growth of a thriving publishing industry in Japan's urban centers. By one estimate, some 22,000 books were released in the cities of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto between the 1720s and 1815, an average of 300 new titles a year. For those who couldn't afford to buy, book-lenders provided access at a nominal cost. Eager citizens availed themselves of texts in wide variety of genres ranging from popular fiction to high literature, illustrated stories, gazetteers, tabloid "true tales," poetry anthologies, religious texts, reference books, and classics from Japan and China. Sekien managed to incorporate facets of nearly all of these genres into his encyclopedias, giving a sense of just how sophisticated Edoites' tastes had grown.
The Man Behind the Monsters
Toriyama Sekien is a pen name. (All names in this book are rendered Japanese style, family name followed by given, but Sekien is generally referred to as Sekien even in Japanese.) He was born Sano Toyofusa in 1712. He must have had a privileged upbringing, as he was born into a prestigious hereditary line of obozu. The term is often mis-translated as "monk" or "priest," and obozu did sport shaved heads, but they were actually high-ranking servants of the Shogun. Some were akin to valets or butlers; others were more like secretaries or assistants. Presumably this connection is how Sekien's parents were able to arrange him a first-rate education including tutelage under the artists Kano Gyokuen and Kano Chikanobu, both masters of the state-sanctioned style of painting known as the Kano school.
When he came of age, it seems he inherited the obozu title himself, but it isn't clear what form his service took. And although he mastered its techniques, Sekien doesn't seem to have been officially recognized as a Kano painter himself. Perhaps, given his wild imagination, he found its inherent conservatism and hyper-focus on convention stifling. Whatever the case, this combination of outsider status and insider knowledge allowed him the freedom to adapt venerable Kano techniques for the populist art form of woodblock printing. He authored or contributed art to more than a dozen books, many of which proved deeply influential, such as the 1773 Toriyamabiko. Playfully named with a fusion of his pen-name and the word yamabiko (mountain echoes), it introduced an innovative technique called fuki-bokashi that allowed artists to more easily add color gradations to their woodblock prints — key to achieving richer imagery.
Throughout his life Sekien took on many apprentices, and he must have been quite a teacher, for several of his pupils went on to become stars of the Japanese art world. Two of the most well known are the great Utagawa Toyoharu (c. 1735-1814), who would found the hugely influential Utagawa school of Ukiyo-e prints, and Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753 — 1806), who lived and studied with Sekien from childhood. Utamaro's highly stylized prints of glamorous beauties from the pleasure quarters enchanted consumers of the day. Decades after his death, they would help fuel the "Japonisme" movement in Europe when re-discovered by Western artists such as Whistler, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, and Van Gogh. But Utamaro was a chip off the old block who also dabbled in demons, monsters, and other strange creatures. This "creepy DNA" manifested throughout the work of Toyoharu's disciples as well, emerging most spectacularly in the prints and paintings of Utagawa-trained artists Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) and Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889), whose striking portrayals of yokai and ghosts still dazzle today.
By the time he passed away in 1788, in his mid-seventies, Sekien was a towering presence among the Edo literati and in Japanese art as a whole. Given the techniques he pioneered and talents he tutored, it's tempting to speculate that had he never lived, the groundwork would never have been laid for geniuses like Utamaro, Hiroshige, and Hokusai to create their masterpieces — let alone influence the course of art on the other side of the planet.
Which makes it somewhat ironic that today he is pretty much only remembered for the yokai bestiaries contained in this book. Great though they are, they must represent but a tiny fraction of his lifetime artistic output, the majority of which has been lost forever. Sekien was no demonologist, and his books are not manuals of the occult. What they are is entertainment from a bygone era. Sekien was as much a poet as a painter, and these books teem with linguistic wordplay, puns, and cultural, literary, and religious references, marking them as the work of a man with a particularly wry sense of humor. That these-tongue-in cheek encyclopedias not only became his calling card, but Japan's most authoritative texts on the subject, is something that he would undoubtedly have found very amusing.
A Supernatural Riot
The basic concept of parading monsters was nothing new. Its origins reach back to at least the 10th century, with the concept of Hyakki Yagyo (the Demon Horde's Night Parade). This supernatural riot on the streets of Kyoto was a popular subject for illustrated scrolls, which in being unrolled to reveal the progress of the monsters' revelry could be called an early form of interactive entertainment. Sekien's books are deeply indebted to this artistic tradition, and to one scroll in particular, a 1737 masterpiece by Sawaki Su shi called Hyakkai Zukan ("Illustrated Creeps") that provided a visual reference for many of the monsters in the first book. Later, Sekien tried his hand at painting a traditional yokai scroll himself, and it still exists today, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. It is a thing of beauty, like a high-definition version of the illustrations in these pages. But as great as it is, it was just another scroll. His books were game changers. Although they lacked the color and intensity of paintings, they represented the dawn of something entirely new.
For one thing, most scrolls simply portrayed the creatures against empty space. Sekien placed his yokai against backdrops that situated them in a time and place — essentially little "habitats." But the far bigger innovation was printing his work in book form. Scrolls were one of a kind pieces of art, treasured by the collectors and institutions that owned them, available only to those few with the wealth to own them or connections to request a viewing. These mass-produced books, on the other hand, unleashed an easily referenced database of the yokai upon the population at large. Today, yokai-related items represent some of Japan's most popular products. Sekien's books are the very first of them.
They emerged in the midst of a boom for encyclopedias and almanacs in Japan. The most sophisticated of these, and one of Sekien's direct inspirations, was the eighty-one-volume opus Wakan Sansai Zue ("An Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia of the Three Realms"), published right around the time Sekien was born in 1712. It represented, somewhat incredibly, the handiwork of just a single man: an Osaka doctor named Terajima Ryoan. Terajima spent decades cataloging information from Chinese and domestic sources on such varied topics as astronomy, botany and pharmacology, geology, geography, zoology, and daily activities such as carpentry and fishing. Think of it as something like the Encyclopedia Britannica of its day. Although intended as factual, this was an era before science and the line between natural and supernatural was blurrier than it is today. Mixed in among the Three Realms' entries are many things that we would consider totally fantastic by a modern yardstick.
So Sekien didn't create the concept of encyclopedias or yokai. But mashing up the two resulted in something that was more than the sum of its parts. His skillful curation of this wild bunch from all over Japan and China resulted in a new standard desk reference that ushered in the yokai's transition from superstitions into pop cultural superstars.
In the end analysis, perhaps Sekien's greatest legacy is launching what might be called the yokai brand. In the second half of the 20th century, the meteoric rise of Japanese firms like Sony, Canon, Toyota, and Nintendo defined the nation's image as a high-tech superpower. In the early 21st century Japan began pivoting from manufacturing of hardware to "soft power": the video games, anime, and manga that form the cornerstone of what has been called the nation's "gross national cool." Sekien's bestiaries are the direct ancestors of the character franchises that fuel this cool factor. Today, yokai fare such as Mizuki Shigeru's Kitaro comic series, the bestselling suspense novels of Kyogoku Natsuhiko, and the video game based Yo-kai Watch represent some of Japan's blockbuster entertainment franchises. All of them owe a large debt to Sekien's books, not only visually but in the way that they catalog and index their own yokai characters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Japandemonium Illustrated by Hiroko Yoda, Matt Alt. Copyright © 2016 Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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Table of Contents
The Illustrated Demon's Horde Night ParardeThe Illustrated Demon Horde from Past and Prersent, continued
More of the Demon Horde from Past and Present
A Horde of Haunted Housewares
