Term · Japanese culture
Yokai
An umbrella term wide enough to hold a river demon, a talking wall and an umbrella with one leg and a tongue.
In Otakana the clue reads: Supernatural creature of Japanese folklore
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
The category covers anything strange enough to need explaining: shapeshifting animals, mountain spirits, water creatures, ghosts of the resentful, and household objects that come to life. Tsukumogami are the last group, tools that reach a hundred years of age and acquire a spirit, which gives Japanese folklore its haunted lanterns and its sandals that hop across the floor complaining about being thrown out.
Most of them were explanations. A sound in an empty corridor, a fog that makes a path vanish, a child who drowns in a river with steep banks. Kappa, the river dweller with a dish of water on its head, kept children away from dangerous water far more effectively than any warning sign, and it works because it is specific and slightly ridiculous.
Two men shaped what the creatures look like now. Toriyama Sekien published illustrated catalogues in the eighteenth century, inventing several entries outright and drawing all of them in the same deadpan style. Mizuki Shigeru turned that material into GeGeGe no Kitaro from 1960 onward, and almost every yokai design in modern anime is downstream of his brush.
Spelling YOKAI
YOKAI carries a long vowel in its first syllable, so the strict romanisation is YOUKAI and the U has no room here. Five letters ending in the AI pair that also closes samurai and isekai. Watch the middle: the K sits between an O and an A, and there are no doubled letters or silent ones anywhere in it.