The Book of Yokai
- About
- Impressions1
- Quotes13
- Readers11
This book is currently unavailable
447 printed pages
- Original publication
- 2015
- Publication year
- 2015
Impressions
- Catherine Annie Tateshared an impression5 years ago
👍Worth reading🔮Hidden Depths💡Learnt A Lot🎯WorthwhileThis is not the easiest book to read (long passages and all) but it's highly informational and educational. I am taking references to draw some yokai
Quotes
- Catherine Annie Tatehas quoted5 years agostarted this book with a discussion of how yōkai emerge as people grapple with mysterious experiences, putting names and faces on occurrences or feelings that are otherwise indescribable. But from at least Sekien’s time onward, we see a complementary process of creation occurring. Just like the yuru-kyara devised all over Japan today, many of the yōkai Sekien invented did not come into being through attempts to describe mysterious phenomena. Rather they were drawn from relevant elements and existing motifs and put together in an interesting and often ingenious fashion. I am not saying that new yōkai characters do not serve a function; I am only noting that their inception is different and, in a sense, more playful. It derives not from the challenge of grappling with the incomprehensible in the world around us but from the challenge of making something new and sending it out into that world.
- Catherine Annie Tatehas quoted5 years agois also clear that even though yōkai may be strange and interstitial, they are not always scary: they are also about play, or the “ludic mode.” In fact yōkai are often produced through playfulness. Many of Sekien’s yōkai, for example, were consciously created from wordplay, and his images are full of visual puns. (Because he puts his newly invented yōkai in an encyclopedic format, however, they seem as if they have been around for a very long time.)
- Catherine Annie Tatehas quoted5 years agoaddition to the mass producers of these widely distributed goods, there is also an overlapping group of people who participate in the production of yōkai items. These individuals grew up with Mizuki’s images and now Kyōgoku’s novels; not satisfied with simply consuming, however, they have entered the fray as independent producers themselves. Some are yōkai otaku, profoundly inspired by manga and anime and possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of yōkai. Others are more enamored with older or localized yōkai manifestations, and have traveled (or read) widely in search of yōkai folklore. I call this the vernacular node, to stress its informal, unof
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