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Monsters everywhere!

Headshot of William Yeoman
William YeomanThe West Australian
Itaya Hiroharu: Night procession of the hundred demons (detail, c1860, handscroll).
Camera IconItaya Hiroharu: Night procession of the hundred demons (detail, c1860, handscroll). Credit: Jenni Carter/Art Gallery of NSW

Remember those weird, nightmarish creatures in the stories of the Brothers Grimm and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder? They’re the stuff of nightmares. But there’s also a comical element to them that reminds you of the yokai of Japan...

As Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt write in their book Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide, “The yokai ... are mythical, supernatural creatures that have populated generations of Japanese fairy tales and folk stories”.

They can be seen, the authors continue, “in museums worldwide on scrolls, screens, woodblock prints, and other traditional forms of Japanese art, menacing hapless citizens or being skewered by swashbuckling samurai”.

Once you’ve been made aware of the existence of these monsters and their ghostly colleagues, yurei, you start seeing them all over the place. Just ask WA science writer and children’s author Cristy Burne, whose Takeshita Demons series is teeming with yokai.

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Burne lived in Japan for three years. “And you just see yokai everywhere,” she says over the phone. “They’re embedded in the society. Even the little green guy who has a sushi chain named after him, Kappa Sushi”.

Katsushika Hokusai: The ghost of Kohada Koheiji from the series One hundred ghost stories (c1831–32 woodblock print).
Camera IconKatsushika Hokusai: The ghost of Kohada Koheiji from the series One hundred ghost stories (c1831–32 woodblock print). Credit: Dan Dennehy/Minneapolis Institute of Art

Until March 8, one of the best places in Australia to see them is at the Art Gallery of NSW’s blockbuster exhibition, Japan Supernatural, now in its closing week (so hurry!).

The centrepiece of the exhibition is undoubtedly Japanese superstar artist Takashi Murakami’s massive mural, especially commissioned by Art Gallery NSW, Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters.

Guarded by two of Murakami’s eye-popping monster sculptures, the mural features cross-eyed samurai and bizarre beings battling a giant cat. Drawing on Japan’s rich yokai (supernatural creatures) mythology and Edo-period woodblock and scroll art, this infernal company threatens to leap off the wall, bursting with dazzling, dizzying energy. Vertiginous is the right word.

Takashi Murakami: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters (2019, acrylic resin paint, gold leaf, glitter, 300 x 1000 cm).
Camera IconTakashi Murakami: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters (2019, acrylic resin paint, gold leaf, glitter, 300 x 1000 cm). Credit: Courtesy Kaikai Kiki/Art Gallery of NSW

Murakami’s mural is only one of the exhibition’s nearly 200 artworks from the 18th century to the present which portray Japanese ghosts, monsters and their victims in just about every conceivable form and posture. Appealing equally to kids and adults, it’s not likely you’ll escape from this show in a hurry. Nor would you want to.

There’s Murakami’s other major work in the show, In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow. There’s Toriyama Sekien’s epic silk scroll Night procession of the hundred demons, from 1772-81, as well as Itaya Hiroharu’s more comical take on the same subject from the following century.

Takashi Murakami.
Camera IconTakashi Murakami. Credit: Will Yeoman/The West Australian

Are these the first manga? Maybe.

There are contemporary Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima’s fantasies featuring cute, round-faced rabbit girls, rock girls and other otherworldly creatures in haunting watercolour on rice paper images.

Just as mesmerising are photographer Miwa Yanagi’s photographic series Fairy Tale, which reinterpret such European fairy tales as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel, while curious netsuke and Hideta Kitazawa’s creeping masks of foxes, demons and kappa (weird, beaked creatures with water-filled indentations on their heads) elicit screams and laughter in equal measure.

Back to Burne, the yokai-obsessed author has, in one blog post, even selected her Top Five Yokai.

There’s Akaname, the Filth Licker, “the demon you really want for a friend... he’s loyal and funny and he loves to clean, so you don’t have to”. And Sagari, Hanging horse-head, who “gets a prize for Weird Monster of the Year: it’s basically a horse’s head that floats around upside-down, has electric nose hairs, sharp teeth, and a habit of dropping on you unexpectedly”.

Then there’s Kodama, the Tree spirit, who inhabit ancient trees, “mimic the sounds of the forest and cause echoes to bounce through the woods”. Noppera-bo, Faceless ghost, a “shape-shifting yōkai (who) can wipe features from its face like words from a whiteboard”. Finally, Betobeto-san, Mr. Footsteps.

“Almost everyone has had the feeling they’re being followed,” writes Burne. “Well, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is…you ARE being followed. The good news is, you’re being followed by Betobeto-san, a sort of oversized, invisible marshmallow on legs. He eats the sound of your footsteps, but don’t worry: he’s quite shy and not at all dangerous (unless you’re allergic to marshmallows?)”.

I tell Burne my favourite yokai are Tsukumogami, objects which have fallen into disuse or disrepair in which kami, or spirits, have taken up residence. In this they become like, according Shinto animism, all things in the natural world.

“Isn’t that a beautiful message,” she says. “Take care of your stuff. You can’t just got to Kmart and get another samurai sword. This is the only one you have and you have to pass it down for generations and if you don’t take care of it, it’s going to come in the middle of the night and haunt you. I just think that’s brilliant.

“Everything has that ability to express itself and come to life,” she continues. “Like if you don’t make your bed, and you leave it for a while and you toss and turn and it feels like your doona is trying to strangle you... well, there’s a yokai for that. It comes to life and will indeed try to strangle you if you don’t make the bed”.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: Minamoto no Yorimitsu preparing to kill the earth spider from the series New forms of thirty-six ghosts (1892, woodblock print).
Camera IconTsukioka Yoshitoshi: Minamoto no Yorimitsu preparing to kill the earth spider from the series New forms of thirty-six ghosts (1892, woodblock print). Credit: Jenni Carter/Art Gallery of NSW

Having recently visited such evocative places as Tokyo’s Yanaka graveyard and Kyoto’s historic Higashiyama district, I felt certain kappa, tengu, nekomata, kitsune and other supernatural creatures were lurking at every turn.

Even more alarming was to encounter their malign yet attractive presence in the more concrete form of brilliant, bizarre artwork by Hokusai and others, much from the Edo Period (1603-1864), in Tokyo’s Sumida Hokusai Museum. And especially in Miyoshi’s weird and wonderful Yumoto Koichi Memorial Japan Yokai Museum, or Mononoke (ghost) Museum, as it’s also known.

Burne agrees the world is a more alive, exciting place if it’s inhabited by yokai. She mentions another of her favourites. “It’s a wall full of eyes,” she says. As you walk past, you feel watched. Now, everyone’s had that feeling, that somebody is watching you. You swing around and nothing’s there. Because those eyes in the wall close when you’re looking and they only open up again to watch you as you walk past. It’s just super”.

Or is that super-creepy? Supernatural, definitely.

William Yeoman travelled to Japan as a guest of AGNSW and Destination NSW. They have not seen or approved this story.

fact file

  • The Sydney International Art Series exhibition Japan Supernatural is at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney until March 8 and is supported by the NSW Government via Destination NSW. Tickets can be used once, any time the exhibition is open. Prices: $25 adult; $22 concession; $62 family (2 adults plus maximum three youths); free for children under 12. For bookings and further information, see artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions /supernatural
  • cristyburne.com

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