A Handful of Yokai- An Introduction to the Monstrous

Aside from a pleasant peak at Constantinople, this blog keeps its eyes focused on the British Isles to discover interesting fodder for Victoriana adventures. Understandable but adventures lie in every corner of the world. We’re spinning the globe towards the Far East to bite into Japanese Yokai.

Simply, Yokai are monsters and spirits of Japanese folklore, however, the word yokai also encompasses any spooky unexplained phenomena such as lights in the sky or mystifying nocturnal noises. The first recorded use of the word from the first century simply describes a general feeling of unease pervading the imperial court. Even just looking at the category of the overtly monstrous Yokai, an incredible variety of bizarre origins, horrifying habits, and deviant details presents rich possibilities for plots and encounters.

Some Yokai spring from superstitions passed on through stories explaining bad luck or mysterious noises. Others started as village deities fallen out of religious practice and into children’s nightmares. Scholars recorded these folktales and myths in compendiums. During the exploding popularity of printed books in the 1700s, Japanese authors then fabricated brand new Yokai to meet the ravenous demand for new ghost stories. They created their Yokai with puns, parody, and satire, which, although initially humorous, made these later Yokai even more bizarre and sinister when viewed outside 18^th century Japanese culture. By the 1850s, strange legends leaked out of Japan from Dutch trade or orientalist travel narratives, bizarre anecdotes of shape-shifting animals and regular everyday objects brought to life. Yokai stories bring to the table everything I look for in a great ghost story, and, as we know on this blog, nothing is more Victorian than that.

Even the most prolific sources of stories only gave their Yokai a few lines of description or reported a couple anecdotal encounters. These sketchy fragments burn two or three interesting details into the reader’s imagination while leaving huge blanks ready for our purposes. I’ll present a Yokai each week along with stats and special rules for the Victoriana role-playing game. Each post concludes with a slew of adventure ideas ready for scenarios set in late Edo Japan or mid-Victorian London. Finally, in the last post of the series, I’ll discuss some possible rationales and excuses derived from history for getting these Japanese monsters into Victorian Britain.

Adventure Ideas

In a campaign of Yokai hunting, short specific descriptions in a scholarly Yokai compendium could provide exactly the right amount of information to recognize a Yokai without giving spectacularly helpful on how to tackle it. The more playful and parodic compendiums could give desperately needed answers if you can solve the puzzles and satirical elements. The Yokai hunters just have to figure out which book they have to pull out in the middle of a fight.

Similar to the satirical Yokai, any number of Victorian magazines and periodicals use allegorical creatures in their political cartoons to represent governments, countries, or concepts. If one achieved physical form, a rampaging caricature or symbol would physically, morally and politically endanger the masses.