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Downloaded from Brill.Com09/29/2021 08:23:37PM Via Free Access 168 Book Reviews Journal of Religion in Japan 7 (2018) 167–196 brill.com/jrj Book Reviews ∵ Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. 309 pages. ISBN 978-0-520-27102- 9. Michael Dylan Foster draws the reader into a haunting tale of the uncanny from the first page. One has the feeling of having opened a book of ghost sto- ries, and immediately finds oneself in a small house in a coastal town in rural Japan, where portraits of unknown people deck the walls at eerie angles and it is unclear why they are no longer living in the house. Are they still here some- how? He describes his experience of an encounter with a suspected haunting in this rented accommodation, and just when we think he is going to explain the experience to us, we are invited along on a journey to understand how the human mind makes sense of things that fall out of the defined borders of the rational, live in the corners of our minds, and disturb, delight, and entertain the edges of our consciousness. As Foster tells us, this is a book of liminal locations: yōkai, those sprites, goblins, demons, and spirits of endless manifestations in Japanese folklore, exist in this in-between place of the human imagination: not the stuff of dreams, but not the subject of full consciousness either. Like- wise, the book itself occupies an in-between-ness, written for more than one intended audience, including at once both the academic and the educated non- specialist and general reader. Last, as he notes, he makes it his task to bring the work of Japanese scholars on the subject of yōkai to an English readership. His style delivers on his promise that he is addressing a wide, non-academic readership (though perhaps not so thoroughly on the hope of understanding the Japanese scholarship on the subject). His insights are accessible and clear, while taking the reader to new understandings of our own fascination with things we cannot explain and our need to give them form, narrative and inten- tion. Further, he makes it clear that our vivid imaginations become forms of entertainment. And while the academic reader wish for a bit more detail at points, the general reader will delight in the erudition and appreciation of the wonderful world of yōkai. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/22118349-00702004Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 08:23:37PM via free access 168 Book Reviews The book provides a wealth of insight and an encyclopedic compendium of the fascinating world of Japanese sprites, demons, monsters, and spirits— those beings we conjure up when we have exhausted the world of the known and rational and must face the fact that some things simply do not make sense. In the first chapter, Foster refers to this as the moment when “event becomes object” (pp. 24–30). That noise you cannot locate. That dream you cannot shake.That sense, when half asleep, that you have “hit a wall.”Yougive it a name and a form and a visual representation. He introduces us (all too briefly here but in greater detail later) to the work of the Japanese scholar of the supernat- ural, Komatsu Kazuhiko, who frames yōkai as a process moving from event (an inexplicable experience, an anxiety, a terror or dread) to sensing the presence of something wholly other and irreducible to logic and consciousness, to an object, a figure, an image of this “thing.” In the early pages of this book, this reader most appreciated Foster’s point that the practice of creating and imagining yōkai is not about “belief,” but rather the need to make tangible (and enjoy and entertain oneself with) the dark cor- ners of human experience. He argues that Japan is not unique in having such figures, but perhaps occupies a special place because such imaginings have been the subject of so much scholarship and literary creativity. Foster introduces us to the overlapping and detailed language of yōkai: demons (oni), nocturnal demon processions (hyakkiyagyō), household objects that sprout eyes and legs (tsukumogami), implying that literally everything in your household is capable of haunting you, and finally ghosts and spirits (obake) and deities (kami). He notes that the view that the world around us pos- sesses animating forces drives much of this rich imaginary world. (This reader was a bit disappointed to see the outdated term “animistic” employed here and later, but the insight was valid.) In his second chapter, “Shape-Shifting History,” Foster traces the long history in Japan of yōkai as cultural phenomena and the scholarship on the subject. Here, his style is a bit too unmoored and freewheeling for the academic reader, and discussions covering several hundred-year swaths of history are covered in a paragraph and introduced with vague underpinnings. The reader with a general interest in yōkai as a cultural phenomenon might not be bothered, but it does limit the book from serving as a more serious academic work to some extent. He rightly points out early in the chapter that in many cases, we are look- ing at the reality of figures of the past through the lenses of a present cultural fashion, and gives the wonderful example of searching for scant references to the historical figure Abe no Seimei (925–1005), a Taoist diviner (onmyōji), only to find when returning to Japan for research that Japan was in the midst of an Abe no Seimei boom, and the historical figure was all the rage in popular rein- ventions of an exotic Japanese past. Journal of Religion inDownloaded Japan from 7 (2018) Brill.com09/29/2021 167–196 08:23:37PM via free access Book Reviews 169 The chapter, organized thematically rather than chronologically, then takes us on a highly readable though wild ride up and down and back and forth through Japanese history as various figures either appear as examples in Japa- nese textual records or as scholars who have studied yōkai are introduced. Foster introduces a number of contexts, including that of hyaku-monogatari (literally “a hundred tales”) as an evening venue where spooky stories were shared. He cites the success of Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Rain and Moon) as an example of the survival of this contextual genre. Once again, we have an anachronistic move back in time to briefly glimpse the practice of visually representing yōkai in picture scrolls. Here, it would have been helpful to have had a better sense of the contexts in which these scrolls were used, and perhaps more visual examples from them. We assume that the wonderful images later in the book precluded including more images here, and the quality of the latter images makes us not sorry at all. Picture scrolls can be easily described for a reader, even when one cannot include their visual images in a book, and Foster’s reluctance to do so here was a disappointment for this reader. The chapter continues with Edo period examples of fascination with yōkai in encyclopedic forms. The final section of this chapter serves as a general introduction of impor- tant figures from the Meiji period who developed and contributed to the study and popularization of yōkai, including the founder of the field of “monster studies” (yōkaigaku) Inoue Enryō (hell bent on demystifying Japan into a more modern era), Lafcadio Hearn (moving in the opposite direction for which we are forever grateful) as a writer for the West, Ema Tsutomu who introduces the concept of “shape shifting,” and Yanagita Kunio, whose researchers made the study of superstition and yōkai part of their mission to chronicle everyday life in a rapidly modernizing Japan and who may have invented nostalgia in Japan before it was even fashionable. A reader might have appreciated a closer reading of each of these thinkers before turning to the post-war period, and, in Foster’s terms, the “animating of nostalgia” (pp. 61–66). It is in the latter half of this chapter that we most appreciate Foster’s atten- tion to the popular. He chronicles the creator of Gegege no Kitarō, Mizuki Shigeru (1922–2015) and notes that while the Meiji era scholars may have debunked or fossilized yōkai, Mizuki makes them live again in his manga and anime. As someone who studied with Miyata Noboru (1936–2000), this reader was disappointed to see but a mere few pages in Foster’s book dedicated to this scholar who did so much to open the eyes of a whole generation of Japanese undergraduate students, anthropologists, scholars of religion, and folklorists to the cultural significance of yōkai in a Japan in transition. While mentioning in Journal of Religion in Japan 7 (2018) 167–196 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 08:23:37PM via free access 170 Book Reviews passing the serious cultural analysis offered by Miyata (seeing yōkai as being of the margins and borders between the urban and the rural), Foster leaves it at that. It is in the third chapter of the first section that Foster’s training as a folklorist really gives the book its thrust. He argues for a yōkai culture network (YCN), which connects a large group of people (so large, he argues, that one might be tempted to consider it meaningless), consisting of all those who are fascinated by or care about yōkai in any given way. This includes regional heritage groups, scholars, those promoting yōkai for commercial gain (toy or film companies, and so on), and yōkai subcultures (of which, we can argue, many aficionados of anime and folklore around the world could be considered a part).
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