It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Encyclopedic Unknowable of Yōkai
“People live in ignorance. Constantly turning a blind eye. Those that let go of their past, have no future.”
Kawahime, the River Princess in ‘The Great Yōkai War’(Takashi Miike, 2005)
How do we rationalize the unknowable? Not only the unseen natural forces which act upon us as humans, but those supernatural forces which thrive in the shadows, go bump in the night, and haunt our dreams and deepest fears?
Michael Dylan Foster’s research into the Japanese phenomena of yōkai offers a political, cultural, and economic approach to answering these questions, placing these uncanny, liminal experiences into several distinctly delineated historical periods. He broadly defines yōkai as literal and figurative shapeshifters who thrive in the natural world but are supernatural themselves. Inexplicable occurrences and unknowable phenomena which have been part of the cultural imagination for as long as history has been recorded. As such, they’re challenging to define because like us, they’re always changing. They’re mutable, have expansive natures of meaning, and encompass a broad spectrum of forms from the concrete and tangible ‘monster’ to the more amorphous ideas and abstract manifestations of numinous apparition.
Yōkai evolve from the notion of bakemono (Foster, 2009, p. 5) the ability to change form, and emerge from an event, a feeling or question we have about our lived experience (Foster & Davisson, 2021). That itch of curiosity we have to make sense of something strange. In this space we learn to identify these feelings and subsequently name them. For example, that unknowable feeling of someone watching us, that feeling that there’s eyes in the walls, manifests itself as the yōkai Mokumokuren (Foster, 2009, p. 66), a creature who exists as a screen with hundreds of eyes. Perhaps the modern Mokumokuren lurks in our omnipresent digital cameras. Or the idea that specific times and places are infested with demons, as we see in Dante’s Inferno, Alexander’s Gates, or early cartography. Frightening, chaotic masses of strange creatures from which we must flee at all costs. That there are undifferentiated and unnamed hordes of the monstrous unknown waiting for us not just in the shadows or under the bed, but in specific parts of the world. Spaces of disorder which must be contained and ultimately conquered. The ‘night procession of a hundred demons’ or Hyakki Yagyō (Foster, 2009, p. 56) articulates Foster’s notion of the terrifying ‘pandemonium’ of the unknown inherent in the culture of yōkai and our deeply rooted biological, neurological fears of the unknowable (Foster & Davisson, 2021).
Foster situates his argument beginning in the Edo period (1603 – 1868), where Japanese culture begins to flourish in parallel with the rise of urbanization and an increase in national literacy. As in naturalist pursuits in western cultures during the same period, the labeling, naming, and differentiating of individual species of yōkai helps us move from the fear of pandemonium to the order of parade. And as with western encyclopedic collection and documentation of species, there exists an incredible abundance and variation of yōkai, of which, just like the natural world, there are hundreds of regional variants.
This encyclopedic mode creates a more rigorous processing, organization, and expression of these collected experiences, framing them as a natural history initiative. Ideas, pictures, and stories were collected, and then classified, organized, illustrated, and described in detail. In doing this, we not only tell stories about the origins of yōkai but introduce a ludic method of playing with them ourselves (Foster, 2009, p. 48-49), of expanding them and treating them with elastic interpretation. We have fun with them, adding to the pantheon with our own thoughts and explanations. This process is playful, light-hearted, creative, and expresses information in a way which makes the encyclopedic classification of these experiences more accessible to a culture rising in literacy. It’s a human application of play onto the supernatural experience of the unknown and feared.
The most notable compiler of yōkai during the Edo period is Toriyama Sekien (1712 – 1788), who creates the large series of Hyakki Yagyō catalogs which collect, but also play with these cultural variations (Foster, 2009, p. 156). This conscious blending of the encyclopedic collection and the ludic modes of expression are still present in modern day Japanese culture in card games such as Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh!, where statistics, strengths, sources of energy, and weaknesses are collected alongside illustrations of various states of development, natural environment, and weaponized form. Sekien is the first to substantially document yōkai as cultural phenomenon and created an early system for making sense of the unknowable which still exists today.
Foster continues this argument through the Meiji period (1868 – 1912), which further aligns Japanese culture with the increasing arrival of outsiders into Japan, broader scientific discovery, continued rise in literacy, and the introduction of different cultures other than their own (Foster, 2009, p. 77-78). The Edo period had essentially been a culture preserved over two hundred years with very little outside influence, but as scientific thinking brought in new ways of approaching the supernatural, Japan began to compare itself to the west, and adapted its understanding of the unknowable as well. In doing this, the rise of scientific method began to declare yōkai as shinkei, a pathology of nervous disorder brought about by supernatural experiences (Foster & Davisson, 2021). In making sense of yōkai, and attributing their existence to mental disorder, there are distinct efforts to undo previous cultural mythology in the yokaigaku work of Inoue Enryō (Foster, 2009, p. 113-114). In defining yōkai he seeks to destroy them, to position them as relics of a primitive past with no place in a modern Japan, and in explaining them as astral phenomena, tricks of the mind, currents of the weather, or simply our mind misbehaving, he aligns perceptions of yōkai with mental illness and attempts to undo centuries of folklore (Foster & Davisson, 2021).
Yanagita Kunio opposes this approach, believing yōkai to be the very heart of Japanese culture, that which made them uniquely Japanese. If yōkai were to be lost, something important to Japanese cultural identity would also disappear, something critical in an age of increasing globalization and national dilution (Foster, 2009, p. 147 & 152-153). In doing this, Kunio creates the Minzokugaku, a comprehensive gathering of folklore which sought to gather and preserve all the stories which were swiftly fading during the Meiji period, and collects them into the Tono Monogatori, the Japanese version of what westerners understand of their own euro-centric cultures through Grimm’s fairy tales (Foster 2009, p.139-142). This perpetual push and pull, give and take between those which would seek progress, and those which would preserve the past characterizes not only our understanding of yōkai, but also our understanding of ourselves.
New yōkai are being born all the time through modern means of literature and movies, but also in our more modern unknown spaces of the internet. If the natural world is increasingly known, yōkai have moved to liminal spaces elsewhere, and thrive today in the darker reaches of the web, in digital corners equally as terrifying as the forests of hundreds of years ago (Foster & Davisson, 2021). They live in those shadows of life where we don’t know the answers, but also in reaches where we can be satisfied with the ambiguities of existence. Where our desire to simply know that they’re there is comfort enough. It’s in these moments where we are at peace with the unknowable, and where yōkai are born. But in conquering the natural world, relentless human curiosity still relies upon significant motivation towards the unknown. We need the unknown to make sense of our lives, and as such, yōkai help us maintain our curiosities and gives form to our fears. But it’s the unknown which gives us life, hope, and a reason to believe. Yōkai don’t explain these feelings, but they do give us a sense of ease in being able to label and give our feelings a name. They give the unknown form and function.
As such, are monsters unknowable? If we are to believe that our definition of known and unknown is constantly expanding and diverging, then the unknowable becomes essential. What becomes known is elastic, as scientific method but also our own comfort levels change over time, with the liminal spaces occupied by creatures such as yōkai expanding and contracting with individual experience. Through all of this however, the unknown is a constant, something we need to feed our curiosity. What’s understood, labelled, and classified only serves to create further liminal vacuums, which get filled in swiftly by the shadows of the unknown. When our natural world is understood completely, and our curiosity is exhaustively satisfied, we still create new spaces of electronic uncertainty with which to terrify ourselves. It’s a process that makes us uniquely human.
We attempt to ‘know’ through methodologies such as bio-genetic structuralism, scientific method, psychoanalysis, coherent arguments of political cause and effect, divine interpretations of God’s wrath, and our historical readings of the uncanny and supernatural, but the constant is that the monstrous and unknowable is within us. It’s us who empower the unknowable to thrive, and us who give the monstrous life. It’s us who give the divine their power through worship and ritual, and us who think we hear the bumps in the dark. Without us, and our hunger for the unknown, there is no belief system where monsters exist. They need us in order to be.
The nature of how things become known is driven by scientific method, philosophy, and literature just as much as it is by societal, economic, and historical moments, but there will always be these spaces of shadow within the world and especially within ourselves. Total encyclopedic illumination is something we strive for, but always fall short on. It’s a noble, but futile goal. To suggest that our belief in monsters can be understood with any degree of confidence is to suggest there is an aspirational moment where fear, curiosity and ambiguity no longer exist. When the unknowable is removed from our experience, we are no longer human.
Our modern experience seeks to catalog and describe everything that’s ever been, and everything that ever will be. We have access to every piece of recorded human experience in our pockets and at our fingertips, available at any time. Everything today is so comprehensively, exhaustively managed and known. But the concept of what’s known is an individual, not a collective experience. We cannot apply an encyclopedic understanding of what’s known to different societies, communities, and cultures equally, and as such, curiosity and ambiguity is compounded, not resolved through these extensive, thorough methods. If curiosity is the root of our relationship with the unknown, we have to believe that the unknown cannot be universally correlated to individual cultures, political, economic, or historic events. We can draw distinctions between the weird and wonderful to societal developments, but we cannot draw an argument of causation for these events where monsters thrive, expressly because our cultural differences are multi-layered, diverse, elastic, and ever-expanding. If monsters are unknowable because they only exist through our lived experience, and if we ourselves are unknowable, then so are they.
References:
Foster, M.D. (2009). Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai. (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Foster, M.D. & Davisson, Z. (2021). Supernatural Beings: Yōkai Past & Present with Michael Dylan Foster and Zack Davisson. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3lpA83gKjU.
The Great Yōkai War. Directed by Takashi Miike, Kadokawa Pictures. 2005.
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