By Anika Stikeleather
University of Maryland Libraries hosted Michele Mason for an afternoon discussion on historical yōkai and contemporary horror manga in Hornbake Library on Friday, Oct. 31.
The second-to-last event of this year’s Scholarship as Conversation series introduced students to a pantheon of creatures and deeper conversations about the nature of horror. Mason works as an associate professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies and is the university’s Japanese program director.
“[Yōkai] It’s really a pantheon of supernatural creatures that are sometimes frightening and sometimes friendly and then everything in between,” Mason said.
In Japan, stories with these creatures serve as practical warnings and moral lessons. Stories were originally passed down orally, but by the eighth century, the advent of Japanese script allowed them to be recorded. Currently, the stories continue to be reimagined through modern genres such as films, video games, manga and anime.
“We all know that Japan’s soft power, right, of its cultural production has this global flow,” Mason said. “The word, manga, actually is in our dictionary.”
Traditional mythical creatures
The kitsune are mythical foxes. Similar to Western lore, they are cunning shapeshifters, known to punish wicked priests, greedy merchants and boastful drunkards. But they are also deeply connected to the spiritual world and certain shrines in Japan. They are thought to bring messages from the gods.
“If you see a mysterious, beautiful woman walking in the street at night, be careful because she might just be a mischievous fox,” Mason said, sparking a laugh from the crowd.
An Oni, a demon or ogre, typically has an exaggerated build and carries a weapon, assisting in their mission of eating people. However, it is very common for Japanese houses to have an oni on top, protecting and fending off bad spirits.
Kiyohime is a separant-like female monster. In the myth, a woman falls in love with a priest. Only to be spurned and transformed into the beast in her anger. According to Mason, she is one of many female monsters and appears often in popular media.
“We want to think about the way gender discrimination plays a part in the way female ghosts and goblins or evil creatures are created,” Mason said. “Women having desire or getting angry has historically been deemed women’s downfall in Japan and other countries.”
Other monsters explain existing fears. Tenjo-kudari, or descending from the ceiling goblin, targets the natural fear of unknown and unexplained noises above one’s head.
“We like explanations, but we use our ghosts and goblins and scary creatures to teach our children,” Mason said.
A Dorotabō scares children away from rice paddies, which are muddy, flooded fields, because children could drown in them.
These myths live on through the original tale and pop culture spaces. The Tanuki, or raccoon dogs, exist in the real world and mythology. When Simon visited Japan, she was surprised to see wooden or ceramic Tanuki statues everywhere.
“He’s got cute, big, round eyes. He’s got a happy face … And then he has giant scroutum,” Simon said. “The scrotum bear was everywhere on people’s porches.”
The 1994 Studio Ghibli film “Pom Poko” features Tanuki fighting back against urbanization encroaching on their habitats. They perfect the ancient art of transformation, part of their traditional lore, to scare off the human incursion, including parachuting using their scrotums.
Modern horror manga creators
Later, Mason discussed books by three modern horror manga authors: Mizuki Shigeru, Kazuo Umezu and Junji Itō. Shigeru was drafted into World War II. Later, he would write “NonNonBa,” a semi-autobiographical comic covering his comical grandma’s life lessons and his early interest in yōkai.
Umezu, known as the god of horror manga, was crucial in developing the genre, beginning his career in the 1950s. His style in “Orochi” involving spooky eyes, featureless faces and a view from above perspective shows the intentionality of art used in the horror genre of manga.
Itō was born in 1963 and is actively creating “bizarre” books exploring the horror in everyday life, Simon said. In the manga “Uzumaki” by Itō, weird things start happening in a single town involving mysterious spirals.
“Horror can be just horror,” Simon said. “Horror functions to be critical about things as a genre in Japan.”
Lindsay Carpenter, head of research education at UMD libraries, organizes the Scholarship as Conversation series. In its second year, they simultaneously doubled the number of events and people who participated in facility talks, film screenings and workshops.
“This year we’re doing horror, things that are seen as sort of like frivolous, actually can be a vehicle for messages about things like politics and gender and race,” Carpenter said.
In the future, she hopes to have more undergraduate student presentations.
“We’d like to provide outlets for students to share work with each other,” Carpenter said.
After the event, participants were invited to explore materials from the Gordon W. Prange Collection. The collection is on the fourth floor of Hornbake Library and includes Japanese print publications from the first four years of U.S. post-war occupation.
According to Kana Jenkins, curator of the collection and librarian for East Asian Studies, many of the horror items at this time came out of the detective genre.
“The biggest thing is for students to understand we are here,” Jenkins said. “All kind of subject area research is possible here.”
Featured Image: View of Hornbake Library at night, behind plants on Hornbake Plaza. Photo by Anika Stikeleather.