Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai (review)

Paralleling a popular boom in yōkai (roughly, monsters, the mysterious, and the weird) that dates from the 1980s, yōkai studies is a field that has been well plowed by Japanese scholars, most notably cultural anthropologist Komatsu Kazuhiko. Relatively little serious treatment, however, has appeared in non-Japanese scholarship despite the widespread social and cultural phenomenon that yōkai represent throughout all levels of Japanese society. Nor have many attempted the kind of multidisciplinary approach that Michael Dylan Foster does in his creatively conceived and wonderfully executed book Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai. This reviewer's own Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Duke University Press, 1999) is really the only English-language work that shares an affinity with Foster's, both in content and in cultural historical approach, but Foster embraces a much broader time frame that spans the last two-plus centuries. In fact, it is this broad scope and the variety of synchronic and diachronic connections that he draws among sources and personalities from the late eighteenth to late twentieth century that distinguish Pandemonium and Parade and make it a noteworthy read for both specialist and interested layperson alike.

While Foster might risk the charge of superficial treatment in his attempt to demonstrate in 216 pages of text the enduring and yet changing textual and visual manifestations of yōkai over the expanse of two centuries, he is not attempting a comprehensive genealogical history of the subject. He taps into some materials (primarily published works in Japanese and a small amount of archival materials) that are relatively obscure and other materials that are widely known but have not been subjected to this kind of scholarly study. Some readers might wish for a more properly rigorous historical treatment or a more properly literary treatment. Foster, however, is not content with the approach or product that strict disciplinary boundaries would imply. He smartly eschews such restrictions since any kind of adequate study of yōkai in Japanese culture requires adopting literary, historical, and anthropological approaches. That Foster is willing to venture in that direction is laudable, and his decision to do so yields rich and refreshing results.

The book's quasi-chronological thematic organization of four core chapters, sandwiched by introductory and concluding chapters, is well constructed and reader friendly. The opening "Introduction to the Weird" clearly lays out concepts and definitions, outlines the breadth and depth of yōkai in Japanese culture, and sets up the four tropes around which the main chapters are organized. Foster begins by usefully explaining the ambiguities and slipperiness of defining and, especially, translating "yōkai," "the weird and mysterious 'things' that have been a part of Japanese culture (and perhaps every other culture) for as long as history has been recorded" (p. 2). After noting that in contemporary usage yōkai has been "variously translated as monster, spirit, goblin, ghost, demon, phantom, specter, fantastic being, lower-order deity, or, more amorphously, as any unexplainable experience or numinous occurrence" (p. 2), he opts to leave it untranslated throughout the work. While this decision trends toward unnecessarily exoticizing yōkai more than it already is, it is the most convenient and arguably the most satisfying option once the term's range in the Japanese context is glossed. The title Pandemonium and Parade gestures toward what Foster calls the "central metaphor" of the book: the movement between yōkai as the many unseen and untamed spirits of nature (pandemonium) and yōkai in a visible, well-ordered quotidian spectacle (parade).

Rather than working this metaphor into a pointed thesis to pursue (beyond demonstrating the extent to which Japan is a "yōkai nation"), Foster sets as his goal the documentation of the discourse on yōkai and "the weird" in four selected epochs as a kind of barometer of mentalités of the...