The Bakemono Zukushi (aka The Monster Scroll)

The Bakemono Zukushi (aka The Monster Scroll) The images featured here are from a Japanese painted scroll known as the Bakemono zukushi. The artist and date is unknown, though its thought to hail from the Edo-period, sometime from the 18th or 19th century. Across it’s length are depicted a ghoulish array of “yokai“ from Japanese folklore. In his The Book of Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster describes a yokai as: “a weird or mysterious creature, a monster or fantastic being, a spirit or a sprite... creatures of the borderlands, living on the edge of town, or in the mountains between villages, or in the eddies of a river running between two rice fields. They often appear at twilight, that gray time when the familiar seems strange and faces become indistinguishable. They haunt bridges and tunnels, entranceways and thresholds. They lurk at crossroads.“ The class of yokai characterised by an ability to shapeshift, and that featured in this scroll, is the bakemono (or obake), a word literall