Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai

Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai By Michael Dylan Foster. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Yökai are, to borrow Michael Dylan Foster's own terminology in this fascinating study, the "monsters" of Japanese folklore. In Western traditions we might think of ghosts, phantoms, banshees, spirits, boggarts, hobgoblins, fairies, and so on. In other words, these are the various beings that inhabit the supernatural world, characterized more by their mischievousness (and often downright malevolence) than by any benign or talismanlike qualities.

Of course, such supernatural beings only exist in relation to the real, human world, reinforcing its values. Foster's approach is to divide the book into four main chapters, each exploring yökai through the lens of a different trope and a particular historical period. Thus Foster convincingly presents the development of yökai culture as a reflection of wider societal changes and, in particular, the tensions that emerged from an engagement with Western intellectual and cultural traditions, with the process of modernization and the embracing of postwar global capitalism.

The first of these chapters looks at yökai culture at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries through the trope of natural history. During this period Japan witnessed a significant growth of interest in Western scientific fields of study, such as pharmacology and botany, leading to the first serious attempts to marshal the pandemonium of the yökai into a more orderly parade through the creation of bestiaries that sought to visualize, name, and classify. This encyclopedic approach brought together the academic world and the popular imagination, but it also claimed yökai as a body of national knowledge, part of...