Japanese Supernatural Tales

A haunting gathering of classic Japanese tales of monsters and demons, yōkai and oni and yūrei, that live on in popular manga, anime, J-horror films, and video games A Penguin Classic Flesh-eating oni demons, kappa water sprites, shapeshifting kitsune foxes, vengeful yūrei ghosts, and other monsters and magical creatures have long lurked in the shadows of Japanese culture, appearing as divine beings in eighth-century myths, dangerous demons in medieval literature, troublesome tricksters in local legends, and sinister predators in modern fiction. With dozens of stories, including twenty-four that have never been published in English, this volume showcases an incomparable range of the supernatural—from the beautiful ghost that seduces a widowed samurai, to the jorōgumo spiders that transform into women to ensnare their human prey, to the sentient reflection that unnerves a night watchman in Haruki Murakami’s “The Mirror”—inviting you into a realm of frightening otherness from a rich, thousand-year tradition.

Michael Dylan Foster (editor) is the author of The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore and Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai. A professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis, he has been the “Yōkai Navigator” since 2022 for the NHK World documentary television series YOKAI: Exploring Hidden Japanese Folklore.