Everyone has heard of vampires and werewolves, but how many have heard of the rokuro-kubi, the tsuchinoki or the sagari? Japan has a wealth of ghosts and monsters, collectively called yokai, which are totally unknown in the West. The bizarre and wonderful folklore of Japan includes giant corpse-eating rabbits, flaming pigs that steal human genitals, perverse water goblins, blood sucking trees, a dragon that impregnates women, cats who animate dead bodies, a zombie whale and a huge flesh eating sea cucumber that grows from a pair of discarded knickers!
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing book,
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This review is from: The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia (Paperback)
I was thrilled at the possibilities of a yokai encyclopedia. If you are like me in that, then you'll probably be as disappointed as I was.
The author seems to have been overwhelmed by the quantity of information, so the book is something of a mess. Yokai are arranged alphabetically by name, but without any form of index or cross-reference, it's not particularly useful. If you say to yourself, "I'd like to see all the yokai that look like women" or "yokai that live in water," or even "all the tengu," "all the oni," "all the yurei," etc., you're going to have to go through the book from A to Z looking for them yourself. If you remember a particular entry but you don't remember its name, you're out of luck. The author is apparently some kind of UFO/Big Foot crank, and that perspective contaminates the book. There's a frequent, naive conflation of images across cultures; if a yokai resembles a black dog, the author is likely to digress into black dog monsters from Norway and Spain, for paragraphs. It's an approach that robs the yokai of both authenticity and a grounding in Japan's cultural traditions. Freeman's silly reductions go directly against the aims of Shigeru Mizuki and other Japanese folklorists, for whom rediscovering the yokai was a way to reclaim Japan's past while embracing modernity. Freeman's cross-cultural comparisons jettison everything that makes the subject matter culturally unique; it's a really stupid way to approach the subject matter. Possibly to increase his page count, he included "creatures" from traditional Chinese (and Japanese) medicine -- representations of germs and toothaches, which don't really seem comfortably at home here. Certainly neither Chinese nor Japanese folklorists chose to include them in their bestiaries, and no scroll-maker depicted them in any hyakki yakko. If there were more books on the subject, this would probably rate two stars, or possibly only one; but Freeman took the time and energy to assemble one of the only yokai monographs in the English language, and for that he earns bonus points, bringing this up to "fair" -- three out of five stars. ------- Edited to add: Since I originally posted this review, two five-star reviews have popped up. The authors of those reviews are both affiliated with the publisher, CFZ. Neither of them was honest enough to mention it. I honestly believe this book deserves two stars, but I'm lowering my review to one star to try and help balance out those who are trying to scam people.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
exhaustive,
By Diplocaulus (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia (Paperback)
A well researched book, densely populated with weird and interesting entries. I discovered more yokai than I had imagined existed. The essays on the more popular Japanese spirit folk--kappa, kitsune, tengu, &c.--are delightfully lengthy, but just as interesting are the more obscure yokai listed here, such as a monk made of ash, a microscopic viral boar, or a giant sea cucumber born from a girl's discarded underclothes. This book is dense with legendary creatures, the entries including any relevant folklore whenever possible.
Although the amount of text is admirable (if not sometimes a little glib), the design of the book is a little disappointing. It's illustrated throughout, but often the works shown (most of them Edo period prints) are pixelated, as if they had been lifted off the web from a Wikipedia article. The original illustrations by Anthony Wallis are reproduced well, but his pictures sometimes pale next to those of Kuniyoshi and other Japanese printmakers. (Also--and I realize this is a huge nitpick--the designers used a title font in the book that does not include all of the glyphs used in yokai names, so occasionally an special character appears in the middle of a heading in a different typeface than the rest of the word. It looks sloppy.) Still, I purchased this book hoping to learn more about yokai, especially the obscure ones I could not find in other books or the internet, and in that sense, this book really delivers. A solid reference for those interested in the weird critters and beings that inhabit Japan's folk tales.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascination read, excellent resource!,
By Natti 29 "natti29" (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia (Paperback)
The Great Yokai Encyclopedia, the first of its kind in English, is a fabulous addition to your library. Richard Freeman does an excellent job with this exhaustive catalog of Japanese Yokai. More than a list of names and definitions, this encyclopedia contains in full the legends and their variants behind the Yokai. From the vengeful Onryo (familiar to many, thanks to The Grudge movies) to rectal-coring Kappas and beyond, Freeman shows us there is no shortage of variety in Japanese monsters or lack of creativity in their mischief and havoc. His passion for the subject adds flavor that transforms the book from a simple encyclopedia into a thrilling read. If you are interested in Japanese folklore or strangeness in general, you will love this book.
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