Yōkai: Ghosts & Demons of Japan. Courtesy/MIFA

MIFA News:

The Museum of International Folk Art (MIFA) will host Zack Davisson’s talk “Masters of Monsters: The Tradition of Horror in Japanese Folklore and Manga” 2-3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 16, as part of the museum’s programming for its exhibit, Yokai: Ghosts & Demons of Japan.

The talk is free with museum admission.

From the ancient weird energy of mononoke to the rise of yokai in the Edo period, Japanese storytellers have a well of frights to draw on. Kabuki artists like Tsuruya Namboku IV spun ancient folklore into modern stories.

Ukiyo-e artists like Yoshitoshi Tsukioka amped up the gore and writers like Ryunosuke Akutagawa refined the shock into terror. This is the inheritance of horror that modern manga artists have continued to build upon. ‘Ge-Ge-Ge no Kitaro’ artist Shigeru Mizuki was one of the first to use Japan’s folkloric past in manga, followed by second-wave artists like Hideshi Hino and Tsunezo Murotani and modern artists like Junji Ito.

Learn more about this legacy of horror.