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chapter 1 Introduction to the Weird mysterious bodies The bones were found in May 2000, in the small town of Yoshii in Okayama Prefecture. News of the discovery, according to one weekly magazine, “set off tremors throughout Japan.” The skeleton was taken to a university to determine whether it really belonged to a tsuchinoko, a legendary reptilelike creature the existence of which had never been scientifically confirmed. After thoroughly examining the specimen, a pro - fessor of biology declared that the remains were not those of a tsuchi - noko but rather of a malformed grass snake. This disappointing news did not dampen spirits inYoshii. In fact, stimulated by the near-discovery, the town was experiencing a “tsuchinoko boom.” A giant statue of the fantastic beast was set up at a neighborhood nursery school, local man - ufacturers began producing tsuchinoko wine and bean cakes, and a re - ward was offered for anybody who could actually find one of the elu - sive creatures. 1 Meanwhile, at a major government-sponsored research institute in Kyoto, an interdisciplinary group of scholars had begun a series of bi - monthly workshops to discuss Japan’s culture of mysterious creatures, spooky tales, and strange phenomena. Participants came from academic fields such as literature, folklore, anthropology, history, geography, reli - gion, and art. Along with several collections of articles, one result of these meetings was the establishment of a computer database with more than 1 2 Introduction to the Weird thirteen thousand entries on supernatural creatures culled from folkloric sources. Opened to the public online in 2002, the database received 180,000 hits in its first month of operation. 2 A popular fascination with the body of a mysterious creature. A gov - ernment-funded academic project to investigate the history and mean - ing of the supernatural in Japanese cultural expression. These two dis - tinct but related manifestations of interest in the mysterious reveal that, at the turn of the twenty-first century, those things that defy established regimes of knowledge, remaining elusive and inexplicable, continue to stir both popular and academic imagination in Japan. I open with these two examples, not only because of their prominence in the media, but also because they demonstrate the multivalence of the mysterious and the weird, notions with the capacity to transcend the logic of local and national, popular and scholarly, belief systems and economic systems. Supernatural creatures negotiate the extremes, creating interaction be - tween local commercial interests (tsuchinoko wine) and scientific study (a professor of biology), academic rigor (a computer database with more than thirteen thousand entries) and popular fascination (180,000 hits). Whether buried within the local landscape of a small town such as Yoshii or inscribed historically into the cultural topography of Japan as a na - tion, mysterious bodies and supernatural creatures operate variously as objects of belief, fear, commercial production, scholarly interest, and pop - ular passion. Such supernatural creatures, the weird and mysterious “things” that have been a part of Japanese culture (and perhaps every other culture) for as long as history has been recorded, are the subject of this study. In contemporary Japanese discourse, they are most often denoted by the word yOkai 妖怪 , variously translated as monster, spirit, goblin, ghost, demon, phantom, specter, fantastic being, lower-order deity, or, more amorphously, as any unexplainable experience or numinous occurrence. I intentionally leave the definition open-ended, for the history of y Okai is very much the history of efforts to describe and define the object be - ing considered. Because the meaning of the word changes with each at - tempt to limn its parameters, at the heart of this study are questions of signification and language. How do we talk of something ambiguous, continually shifting, a constant presence that is forever absent? How do we describe the mysterious body always on the verge of discovery, the apparition already disappearing in the mist? My objective is to explore some of the ways y Okai in Japan have been understood and interpreted through time, how they have played a role in vernacular practices, and Introduction to the Weird 3 how they have informed academic discourses that describe, explain, deny, or cherish them. yo¯ kai discourse The y Okai, as has been said of the “monster” in the West, “is an em - bodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.” 3 In this study, I consider a long chronological swath, from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, in order to explore discourses that imbue y Okai with specific meanings during different cul - tural moments. By unpacking such discourses, we can uncover the hid - den philosophies and unconscious ideologies that circumscribe a cate - gory of things weird and mysterious. The notion of “discourse” I employ here involves an entire sociocultural web of written and oral forms of expression, ideas, beliefs, and traditions that are enmeshed and symbi - otic and just as often contradictory and antithetical. Like many of the monsters in this study, the discourse of y Okai is hybrid: it weaves together strands from other discourses—encyclopedic, scientific, literary, ethno - graphic, folkloric—to create a discrete discursive formation of its own. Certain voices within this y Okai discourse are louder at certain times, but ultimately all the voices that coalesce dialogically at a given moment are “within the true” (as Foucault puts it). They are in conversation (though not necessarily explicitly or consciously) with one another; every artic - ulation participates in the same discussion (or argument), and makes sense within the dominant episteme. 4 To a certain extent, the discourse on y Okai is unusual not only because it incorporates voices from a diverse range of disciplines but also because its very object—that which is out of the ordinary—challenges ordinary discursive parameters. Y Okai discourse is always located at the bound - aries of the other fields on which it draws. At any given moment, how - ever, a range of “truths” is still accruing to the idea of y Okai itself, a cer - tain pitch, as it were, in which the discourse of y Okai must speak in order to be heard. As sociocultural contexts change, shifts in the conversation about yOkai are rarely the result of violent rupture: usually they are gradual, nuanced, overlapping, as one part of the discursive web centers on a par - ticular idea, gathering mass until it becomes dominant. Epistemic changes are not absolute: more often than not, traditional understandings and articulations are refashioned within newly emerging ones. The mode by which y Okai discourse changes might be characterized as what archeo - 4 Introduction to the Weird logical anthropologists call seriation, “a pattern of overlapping replica - tion and innovation.” 5 It is the replication or persistence of particular strands of discourse, their ability to link diverse cultural moments and reincorporate themselves differently “within the true” of the emerging episteme, that allows us to trace the mutable but somehow consistent notion of something called y Okai. While I am interested in both conti - nuities and discontinuities, the real concentration of this book is on the areas of overlap and “in-betweenness.” Rather than chart a neat ge - nealogy of paradigms, I explore the untidy spaces where ways of think - ing clash, collide, reproduce, and converge. It is not my intention to trace all discourse related to y Okai. Rather, within the long chronology covered in the chapters that follow, I focus on four “moments” during which y Okai discourse was especially promi - nent and characteristic of wider cultural concerns, and in which we can clearly see the persistence of old forms even as new forms emerged. The first of these important historical junctures occurred during the Edo, or Tokugawa, period (c. 1603–1867), particularly from the 1660s through the 1780s, when y Okai made a name for themselves in both serious en - cyclopedic taxonomies and playful illustrated catalogs. The second mo - ment came during the Meiji period (1868–1912), especially in the 1880s, as y Okai underwent a radical reevaluation in light of Western scientific knowledge. The third moment encompassed the first decade of the twen - tieth century through the 1930s, when y Okai were refigured as nostalgic icons for a nation (and individuals) seeking a sense of self in a rapidly modernizing world. And the fourth came in the 1970s and 1980s, as Japan asserted a new identity after its rapid recovery from the devasta - tion of World War II. To a certain extent, my aim is to sketch out the contours of each of these moments and the role played by y Okai within them. More important, by unveiling a culmination of the influences, the incremental movements as one paradigm stutter-steps into another, I un - cover a landscape characterized as much by discontinuity as by overlap and interaction. Out of this ever-shifting terrain emerge the cultural practices on which this study is based. Such practices can be ritualized and institutional, or they can simply be everyday ways of being and interacting. Reading manga, telling ghost stories, playing games, collecting things: all of these are creative cultural forms that shape and are shaped by the signs that accrue around them, the visible, readable discursive threads by which we know of their existence. And ultimately it is these written texts that serve as the accessible material trace of thoughts or actions or events. Although Introduction to the Weird 5 one objective of this study is to read through written documents to get at the otherwise unknowable practices they encode, this mode of analy - sis must be complemented by consideration of the document itself as an object of interpretation—appearing in a specific situation, with a certain author (known or unknown) and a particular readership (known or un - known).

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