THE HISTORY OF YŌKAI

EXPERT BIO

MICHAEL DYLAN FOSTER

Michael Dylan Foster is Professor of Japanese and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches courses on Japanese folklore, heritage, tourism and popular culture. He is the author of The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore (2015).

By some accounts, Japan is a country littered with strange and mysterious creatures. For instance, if you bathe in a river on a hot summer’s day then beware turtle-like monsters that snap at you from the water, threatening to pull you in and consume you. Travellers walking moonlit roads should be heedful of warnings of vast skeletal ghouls, whose chattering teeth and rattling bones can be heard on the wind. That’s not all: watch out for one-eyed umbrellas with long tongues or women who seem ordinary enough, until their necks stretch in the night and their heads go seeking prey. What do all these bizarre and peculiar monstrosities have in common? They are all Yōkai, a class of supernatural beings from Japanese folklore whose enduring popularity and creative versatility has made them something of a cultural staple.

“Generally the way the term Yōkai is used these days is as a catch-all phrase for all sorts of mysterious and spooky creatures,” says Dr Michael Foster, a Yōkai expert and the author of “It generally refers more to monsters based in folklore as opposed to something like Godzilla, because he’s