Legend has it that Japan's Heian period was an era of darkness and the coexistence of demons. Humans and demons overlap spatially, people move during the day, and demons appear at night. At the turn of day and night, it is the time of the devil. The shadows fade away, and the ghosts wander away. Commonly known as the Hundred Ghosts Nocturnal Walk.
Hundred Ghosts Nocturnal Scroll. Collection of the National Museum of Japanese History and Folklore (partial)
Toriyama Ishitsu (とりやま せきえん, 1712-1788), formerly known as Toyo Toyo, was a ukiyo-e painter of the mid-Edo period who was known as the most accomplished yokai painting. His yokai scrolls are full of pictures, most of which are equipped with more detailed descriptions of yokai, which can be described as both graphics and text. Each of his monsters has a distinct personality and is handled in great detail. For example, the pattern of the clothes on the yokai, the pattern in the background screen, and even the grass and trees are all in place.
Toriyama Ishitsu was one of the leading yokai painters of the Edo period, and he not only inherited the style of the "Kano School" founded by Masanobu Kano and Motonobu fathers and sons, but also cultivated famous ukiyo-e masters such as Kitagawa Kaoru and Utagawa Toyoharu.
Hundred Ghosts Nocturnal Scroll. University of Tokyo Library Collection (Partial)
Since the Edo period, with works such as Toriyama Ishitsu's "Drawing Hundred Ghosts Nocturnal Walking" depicting yokai as "things" in the naturalistic sense in the form of "yokai illustrated books", yokai have gradually faded their sense of psychological reality and been given a certain role image. Toriyama Shiyan carefully created each of his own monsters, the most special thing is that the monsters he depicts do not have a sense of gloom and terror, but have an inexplicable sense of closeness. The main images of youkai in his writing are as follows:
First, the monster in the mountain forest
The yokai that inhabit the mountain forest are represented by tengu. Inhabited deep in the mountains, tengu have unimaginable supernatural powers and are one of the most powerful of the Japanese yokai. The image of the tengu is usually a bird's beaked body with a pair of bird wings behind it. Tengu likes to intersect with humans and is a yokai that is active in the circle of human life. From the city to the countryside, from the palace nobles to the common people, they all dealt with the tengu. Tengu has magic and can use magic to confuse humans.
Tengu Toriyama stone swallow painting
The tengu in toriyama's painting is a unique eagle shape in the legend of the ancient tengu, the Utengu, which is at a lower level among the tengu.
Second, the monster in the water
The yokai that inhabit the water are represented by kappa. Kappa is a yokai in Japan that is as famous as ghosts and tengu, it looks like a child, has limbs, is slender, and its skin is as sticky and shiny as the skin of a frog, and it will leave traces of mucus wherever it walks. The most obvious feature of the kappa is that it has a depression in the center of its head, which is disc-shaped, full of vitality when there is water, and weak when there is no water.
Kappa Toriyama stone swallow painting
Third, the wraith represented by the bone girl
Many of the Japanese yokai can be said to be between the monster and the genie, and the legend behind these elves is often very bleak, such as the bone girl before a woman who was bullied, ravaged and insulted by others, and after death, she turned into a yokai with strong resentment and retaliated against the man who misbehaved. Her soul clings to the skeleton, carrying a peony lantern to confuse the men who pass by. In the eyes of men, she is a woman with a good face, but in the eyes of others, she is only a white bone.
Bone Girl Toriyama Stone Swallow Painting
Fourth, pay the mourning god
The god of mourning refers to the fact that the artifacts are placed for a hundred years, absorbing the essence of heaven and earth, accumulating grievances or feeling Buddha-nature and spiritual power, and obtaining the soul to become a monster, represented by the Elder of The Three Tastes. Shamisen is a traditional Japanese stringed instrument, similar to the Chinese three-string, consisting of a slender shaft and a square speaker. Legend has it that the Elder of Shamisen is a youkai formed by the shamisen attached to the musician, whose body is a human body and whose face is the shape of a square speaker of the shamisen, and usually appears as a reading book. The yokai's expression was sad, showing the helplessness and loneliness of the sanshin after it was abandoned.
Sanmi Elder Toriyama Stone Swallow Painting
Toriyama Shiyan's lifelong paintings of "Drawing Hundred Ghosts nocturnal Walk", "Drawing Hundred Ghosts in the Past and Present", "Picking Up Hundred Ghosts in the Past and Present", and "Bag of Hundred Instruments in Vain" are known as "immortal masterpieces". A total of 207 types of yokai are depicted in these four scrolls, and most of these yokai shapes have become the prototypes of yokai in today's Japanese yokai culture, and have laid the foundation for later works on yokai themes. For example, the famous yokai mystery novelist Natsuhiko Kyogoku and the manga master Shigeru Mizuki have inherited his yokai system.