Toriyama Sekien, the Edo Artist Who Gave Yokai Their Faces

Kamaitachi, Yuki-onna, Rokurokubi. Hear the name of a yokai, and a certain shape probably comes to mind. Many of those shapes actually spread from the picture books of a single Edo-period artist: Toriyama Sekien.

The artist who turned yokai into an encyclopedia

Toriyama Sekien was a painter of the mid-Edo period, said to have trained in the Kano school. What made his name last was Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (The Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons), a book of yokai pictures published in 1776.

Before that, yokai were usually painted marching together in long scrolls. Sekien pulled them out one by one and set each beside its name. Turn a page, and a new yokai steps forward — you could call it the prototype of today's yokai encyclopedias.

The book was popular enough to get sequels: Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, Konjaku Hyakki Shui, and Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, making a series of four in all.

Yokai from our Yokaipedia

Some of the yokai in the Pixel Yokai Yokaipedia appear in Sekien's books, too.

• Kamaitachi: a sharp-clawed weasel drawn inside a whirlwind
• Yuki-onna: a pale woman standing in a blizzard
• Rokurokubi: a woman whose neck stretches and stretches

And in the third book of the series, Konjaku Hyakki Shui, he drew the shaggy, hair-covered Keukegen. Almost no legends about this yokai survive — it became known largely because Sekien introduced it with a picture and a short note.

Between legend and invention

Sekien's books mix yokai from long-standing folklore with others that seem to have been born from wordplay or satire. Where does old legend end and Sekien's own invention begin? The fuzziness of that line is part of what makes his yokai art so fun.

By the way, the giant skeleton Gashadokuro doesn't appear in Sekien's books. It's a much newer yokai that spread in the Showa era.

His student: Kitagawa Utamaro

Sekien was also known as a teacher, and one of his students was Kitagawa Utamaro, famous for his portraits of beautiful women. It's a curious connection: one of the great ukiyo-e masters of Edo grew up under the artist who made a book of yokai.

Introducing yokai "one at a time, by name and by face." The method Sekien began some 250 years ago lives on, loosely, in what Pixel Yokai does with pixel art.