#bewareofcucumbers

The Yokai is a Japanese class of monsters and the word roughly can be translated to “phenomenon that surpasses human knowledge”. Very prominent in early folklore, the Japanese approached the Yokai with academic fervour and went to great lengths to class, categorise and write down their attributes, but never actually depicted them.

As the world progressed and people begun to find rational explanations behind certain phenomena they attributed to the Yokai, their numbers started dwindling. The Yokai started living a second life n the 1700’s as the printing press made it possible for their stories to reach a wider audience and writers begun inventing new yokai to incorporate into their storytelling.

Toriyama Sekien (1712 –1788) is a key figure of that era, as Sekien begun to actually draw the Yokai, and thus give a visual anchor to the story. Yokai today are ultra popular as they have moved to manga, dolls, movies and even some odd looking kitchen utensils.

Here are three of our favorite Yokai and what they do:

Makuragaeshi: This lot have a bedding fetish. They appear in a bedroom where someone is asleep and rearrange the pillows. That’s it.

Kappa: They live in the water and they attack you when you get too close…There are two ways that you can use to catch a kappa. Lure it out with a cucumber, (Kappas are suckers for cucumbers). Or you can try method 2: Expose your anus to it, (there is one thing Kappas like more than cucumbers)