Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro

What it is

Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro is a picture book from 1781, the last of four that the Japanese artist Toriyama Sekien devoted to yōkai, the monsters and odd spirits of Japanese story. Each page presents a creature in picture form, gathered into one printed gallery. The title carries a joke: hyakki, which normally spells a hundred oni, or demons, is written here with a character meaning vessel instead. That swap points to the book's favourite monsters, tsukumogami, things made by human hands that are said to have gained a mind and a will of their own. The whole work runs to three slim booklets, and early editions present it as the notes of one strange dream.

Where it comes from

Sekien brought this volume out in 1781 as the closing part of a four-book run that had opened with Gazu Hyakki Yagyō and grown through two later collections. Its deepest debt is literary. Tsurezuregusa, a book of short essays that the monk Yoshida Kenkō set down in the fourteenth century and often rendered in English as Tales in Idleness, supplied subjects and the echo in the title. Where the earlier volumes leaned on older lore, most of the beings here look to be Sekien's own inventions, raised out of phrases and little stories in Kenkō's collection, with more drawn from other writings.

How it is done

This is a book to look at, not a rite to perform. It is divided into three sub-volumes named Jō, Chū and Ge, plain position words in Japanese that English editions usually count as first, second and third. Each booklet carries its own roll of creatures. Printings vary in one respect: the earliest ones open with a short preface that frames the whole work as the jottings of an odd dream, while the third printing drops that introduction altogether.

Tools and materials

The swap in the title is the book's master key. Hyakki ends, as a rule, with the character for oni, a demon; Sekien substitutes the character for a vessel. Readers thus know before opening it that the cast inside will be largely tsukumogami, objects shaped by human craft that are held to have turned into living spirits. Things people have made supply most of the monsters.

What it is for

Nothing here reads as a manual. The book gathers, names and pictures a crowd of spirits, and much of its pleasure lies in spotting the literary game: creatures raised from phrases and small tales in Kenkō's essays and elsewhere. As a bestiary it offers readers a roll call of yōkai rather than charms, blessings or rites, and it makes no claim to heal, harm or foretell.

What people believe

Two strands of Japanese lore hold the book together. One is yōkai: the broad family of strange beings, grotesque or comic, that populate Japanese tales and pictures. The other is the tsukumogami idea, under which an object made by people can pass over into sentience and act as a creature with purposes of its own. Even the old word for a throng of demons, a hundred oni, is bent so that the counted beings become vessels instead. The dream preface in early editions wraps the gallery in a story, as if the artist had merely set down what he saw while asleep.

Compare and confuse

The volume sits at the end of a set of four, and readers sometimes blend it with its siblings. Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, the first, gave the whole series its name. What marks this closing book out are the traits the earlier ones lack: a cast largely of the artist's own devising and a loose dream narrative holding the pages together.

Today

The set still travels. A translation of the entire four-book series, with notes added, was published for English readers in 2016. In Japan, a copy of the third printing is preserved at the National Diet Library of Japan, and pictures from that edition are the ones used when the book is shown.

Questions people ask about Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro

Good reading and sources

• Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data