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Japan Supernatural: Ghosts, Goblins and Monsters, 1700s to Now ed. by Melanie Eastburn

2022; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.2022.0060

1549-4721

Kit Brooks,

Museums and Cultural Heritage

Reviewed by: Japan Supernatural: Ghosts, Goblins and Monsters, 1700s to Now ed. by Melanie Eastburn Kit Brooks (bio) Japan Supernatural: Ghosts, Goblins and Monsters, 1700s to Now. Edited by Melanie Eastburn. Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2019. 312 pages. A$45.00, paper. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have experienced restricted movement. While trapped in a repetitious daily cycle cloistered within now over-familiar surroundings, we welcome any escape into fantastical realms of the imagination. And yet, even without a population of housebound hostages as readers, Japan Supernatural: Ghosts, Goblins and Monsters, 1700s to Now is a dense and delightful volume—a catalogue for an exhibition held at the Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, between November 2019 and March 2020. Unfortunately, I was unable to see the exhibition and cannot address how the book augments the experience of the installation, and vice versa. For example, the exhibition included murals by a Sydney-based illustrator, Kentaro Yoshida, and the organizers commissioned an enormous painting on canvas by Takashi Murakami. The latter was very likely unfinished in time to meet publication deadlines, but the book does include some working sketches (the murals can be viewed on Yoshida's website1). Further, the installation also contained a number of sculptures and installations as well as video and animation works by Fuyuko Matsui, Chiho Aoshima, and Tabaimo, which can only be represented by stills in the catalogue. These elements would surely [End Page 487] have created an absorptive atmosphere not unlike the supernatural realms we are encouraged to imagine. Nonetheless, the book offers its own unique experience and is clearly the product of thoughtful and careful design. It is richly illustrated, and images dominate over two-thirds of the total content. The presentation is kept dynamic by a shifting variety of page designs that anticipates the diversity of the creatures found within. Already, a comparison might be made with the first great monster miscellany, Toriyama Sekien's 1776 Gazu hyakki yagyō (Night parade of one hundred demons). Readers may similarly mine these pages to find their own favorites. The catalogue contains a range of essays, supplemented by a glossary and a helpful bibliography. The text section begins with a short preface by Mami Kataoka and an introductory essay by the show's curator, Melanie Eastburn, which lays out the terrain for the rest of the volume. This topography is a little unstable, as some elements in these introductory segments seem at odds with assertions in the remainder. At times the supernatural is proposed as an ever-present, ever-accessible realm that is surely just as close to hand in the indigenous ancestral lands of Australia as anywhere else, but also as a superstitious belief system that had been dismissed by the Meiji authorities in Japan until a more recent resurgence in the later twentieth century. Such uncertainties are reflective of the difficulty endemic to the project of imposing a firm coherence on an asynchronous set of beliefs that oscillates between the widely held and the deeply personal. The following essays by Komatsu Kazuhiko and Michael Dylan Foster focus on yōkai, with both authors celebrating the recent emergence of yōkai studies as a serious field of study. Though the bulk of the works represented throughout the book date from the Edo and Meiji periods, these essays (like others in the volume) bring the conversation into the present with contemporary examples, attributing the revitalization of yōkai imagery to Shigeru Mizuki's 1960s manga GeGeGe no Kitarō (Spooky Kitarō). Zack Davisson's essay asserts the persistence of belief in yūrei in the contemporary era by relating the author's own experience. In a book about the permeation of the supernatural into everyday life, such self-reflective moments throughout the texts seem fitting. Davisson sets up the intensely personal basis for the ghost-painting genre in Japan, often located in Maruyama ōkyo's Oyuki no maboroshi (The ghost of Oyuki, c. 1750). This posthumous portrait of the artist's own lover was based on his brush with her spirit, and Davisson's essay is supported by an excellent selection of ghost paintings in the catalogue. Although...