My love for folklore should be pretty well-established by now, so I don’t think you’ll be surprised to know that I made a trip to Library@Orchard just to find a copy of Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopiedias of Toriyama Sekien.

As with An Introduction to Yokai Culture, I found this by searching “yokai” in the NLB catalogue. As a translation and annotation of Toriyama Sekien’s yokai encyclopedias, this was an eye-opening look into how yokai were viewed during Edo-era Japan. Sekien wrote quite a few of these encyclopedias, and the ones translated and annotated are:

• The Illustrated Demon Horde’s Night Parade (1776)
• The Illustrated Demon Horde from Past and Present, Continued (1779)
• More of the Demond Horde from Past and Present (1781)
• A Horde of Haunted Housewares (1784)

There are almost three hundred pages in this book and it is a treasure trove of information about yokai, some of which are pretty old, and some of which seem to have been made up by Sekien himself.

Personally, I found the annotations here to be very valuable. Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt put in a lot of work not just to explain the translations, but to bring out allusions that Sekien may have been making through his pictures and point out references he has made – through their notes, I realised that Chinese culture had a bigger influence on Edo-era Yokai than I imagined!

While the translations and annotations are interesting and easy to read, it does take some time to get used to the layout of the book. I’m used to books being either in the Western style (left to right), or the Japanese style (right to left). Here, the book is formatted right to left, but if there are two columns of text on a page, it needs to be read left to right. It took a couple of entries for me to get used to that.

If you’re interested in yokai, this is a book that you’re going to want to read. As a text that has been analysed by academics, the Yokai Encylopedias of Sekien pair quite nicely with An Introduction to Yokai Culture, which provides an academic overview (Sekien is also mentioned in An Introduction to Yokai Culture). I’m glad that the book reproduces the original pages because the drawings are absolutely lovely as well!