Ehon Hyaku Monogatari


The Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, also called the Tōsanjin Yawa is a book of yōkai illustrated by Japanese artist Takehara Shunsensai, published about 1841. The book was intended as a followup to Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō series. Like those books, it is a supernatural bestiary of ghosts, monsters, and spirits which has had a profound influence on subsequent yōkai imagery in Japan.
The author's pen name is Tōsanjin; however, in the preface it is written as Tōka Sanjin. According to the Kokusho Sōmokuroku this is considered to be a gesaku author from the latter half of the Edo period, Tōkaen Michimaro.
It can be said that this is a kind of hundred-tale kaidan book popular in the Edo period, as "100 Tales" is part of the title, but rather than being tales with story titles, yōkai names are printed with illustrations of yōkai, so it could be said that this work is a fusion of kaidan book and picture book.
This book is also known by the title Tōsanjin Yawa because the title on the first page of each volume is "Tōsanjin Yawa, Volume ." Scholar of Japanese manners and customs Ema Tsutomu and folklorist Fujisawa Morihiko, as well as magazines at that time, introduced this book by the name Tōsanjin Yawa, and so this title became famous. On the other hand, Mizuki Shigeru, in his 1979 Yōkai 100 Monogatari describes it in his references as "Ehon Hyaku Monogatari."
It has also been recognized that a book with completely the same contents, titled Ehon Kaidan Zoroe, was published in 2005 by Yumoto Kōichi. The preface's title is changed, and the title of each volume is Ehon Kaidan Zoroe Volume rather than Tōsanjin Yawa Volume . Upon examination, it appears to be an earlier publication than Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, with the relationship that the inscriptions of "Tōsanjin" and "Tōka Sanjin" are mixed, and it also is generally suggested that the first edition of Ehon Hyaku Monogatari'' may have been published before 1841.

List of creatures

The illustrations below are numbered by volume and appearance order. For example, the third illustration in the first volume is 1–3, and so on.

First Volume