Anime Draw Boxes to Capture Yokai

We live in a world of monsters

Yōkai is an umbrella signifier for things we usually associate with terms such as monster, spirit, goblin, demon, phantom, spectre, shapeshifter, and so on.¹ Originating in local legends in Japan, in folktales and regional ghost stories, yōkai take many forms.² They are commonly associated with folklore, but they have also long populated literature and visual culture. Toriyama Sekien (1712–88), an eighteenth-century scholar, poet, and artist, produced the illustrated books of yōkai that appeared in Hyakki Yagyō, or monster parade scrolls. This creation of images is profoundly important to the cultural history of yōkai.³ It has meant that the depictions of certain yōkai have become fixed.⁴ Sekien's compendia of everyday demons was translated into English and published as Japandemonium in 2016, triggering a resurgence of scholarly interest in yōkai and their visual representation. Today yōkai are found in anime, manga, film, video games, and role-playing entertainments.⁵ This essay will focus on one yōkai, Amabie, a mer-monster from Japan's Edo period (1603–1868), who is being revived to ward off the Covid-19 virus in 2020. I will argue that our understanding of crises is enhanced via the hybrid monsters they engender; here, I focus on the viral spread of the apotropaic image of Amabie via the internet. I also position Amabie as a Gothic artefact, though one which invites a revision of some of the approaches to monstrosity prevalent in Gothic studies.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's monster theory, developed at the end of the twentieth century, asserts that 'the monster is born at a metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place'.⁶ He argues that 'the monster's body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically "that which reveals", "that which warns", a glyph that seeks a hierophant.'⁷ Cohen's monster theory appears on first reading to be applicable to the hybrid yōkai, and thus relevant to its deployment in the current pandemic. However, there are questions that arise over how the theory might accommodate a benevolent and reassuring monster, such as Amabie, whose story is a consoling fantasy, rather than a myth of terror. The playfulness of yōkai, which exhibits a tension between the fearful and the comic, is perhaps more easily accounted for in Catherine Spooner's theory of post-millennial happy Gothic, as I will show.⁸ With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, a mode of 'CoronaGothic' may be discerned; it is the significance of Amabie's role in crises to which I now turn.

Japan's curious first encounter with Amabie was recorded in wood-block printed bulletins, or Kawarabanj, in May 1846, accompanied by a likeness of the creature (see Figure 1).⁹ This helped to disseminate the image widely across Japan. Amabie's story begins with a government official investigating a mysterious green light in the water in the former Higo province, whereupon a glowing-green creature with fishy scales, long hair, three fin-like legs, and a beak emerged from the sea. The creature introduced itself to the official and predicted two things: a rich harvest would bless Japan for the next six years, and a plague would ravage the country. The mysterious mer-creature insisted that, in order to stave off disease, people should draw an image of it and share it with as many people as possible.¹⁰

The first depiction of Amabie in Kawarbanj, May 1846. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

For many of the 174 years following 1846, Amabie has remained dormant. But as the Covid-19 virus swept across Japan, Amabie's image resurfaced on social media, bringing hope to those who share it that it will help to end the current pandemic. Artists have been quick to publish cartoon versions of Amabie on social networks.¹¹ Orochi Do, an art shop specialising in hanging scrolls of yōkai, is said to have been the first to post Amabie on Twitter as a new 'coronavirus countermeasure' in late February 2020.¹² This fishy, longhaired, birdlike yōkai has now inspired thousands of images of itself in Japan in recent weeks, appearing on cakes, noodles, face masks, and hand sanitisers. It has even sparked the #AmabieChallenge on Twitter – urging people to share their own Amabie image world-wide to save them from the coronavirus. Its popularity has since spread to five continents.

In Japan, as the country declared a state of emergency, people reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic in a unique way: by sharing images online of this mystical, mermaid-like being believed to ward off plagues. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has since enlisted Amabie for an awareness flyer it circulated on social media, urging people to 'stop the spread of infection' (see Figure 2).¹³ A feeling of hope is generated by each new sharing of the mer-creature's image, and Amabie is now a unifying force as Japan reaches deep into its own folkloric past to find solace during the current crisis.

Health promotion flyer from Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, using Amabie's image. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

I argue that this resurrected folkloric narrative is a Gothic one. Yōkai have Gothic credentials, as shown in their affinity to darkness and shade. Michael Dylan Foster explains that yōkai can appear at any time of the day or night, but they prefer 'the dim light of twilight or dawn … the ushimtsu, the third quarter of the hour of the ox, about 2.00–2.30 a.m. when night was at its darknest'.¹⁴ Another common characteristic of yōkai is their liminality, their 'inbetweenness'. Foster relates that yōkai are 'creatures of the borderlands, living on the edge of town, or in the mountains between villages, or in the eddies of a river running between two rice fields … they haunt bridges and tunnels, entranceways and thresholds. They lurk at crossroads'.¹⁵ 'Liminality' refers primarily to the concept of the threshold, the area between two spaces, or what lies between the known and the unknown; it is frequently claimed for the Gothic mode.¹⁶ It is perhaps unsurprising that Amabie has returned at a symbolically dark moment in history. Rather than lurking obscurely in the shadows, the Amabie is now the beacon that is guiding us out of the darkness.

Yōkai haunt thresholds and shadows, they are unsettlingly hybrid, and undeniably Gothic. Amabie is also reassuringly prophetic (and Cohen claims that monsters serve to warn). Yumoto Kōichi uses the term 'Yogenjū', or prophesy beasts; Amabie is one of this type of yōkai.¹⁷ There are others too. Kudan is a human-faced bovine. Upon being born, it utters a prophecy which will always come true, then dies. It is said to appear at times of unrest, natural disaster, or epidemic.¹⁸ Images of yōkai were popular good luck charms in the Edo period despite their monstrosity, and Amabie is more powerful than most because it is apotropaic, averting evil via the circulation of its own image.

The mermaidisation of Amabie

Despite having three legs, Amabie is often referred to as a mermaid, as are the ningyō, or Japanese 'human fish' yōkai.¹⁹ The size, shape, and countenance of ningyō vary. Generally, the upper body of the creature, sometimes just the head, sometimes the arms as well, is human, while the lower body is of a fish. The inverse has also been found on occasion. In many Edo-period illustrations, ningyō also have horns protruding from their otherwise human-like heads.²⁰ Ningyō bring good fortune and in some cases immortality: there is an old Japanese myth that eating mermaid flesh brings immortality, as in the tale of Happyaku Bikuni, an 800-year-old nun who ate a ningyō as a child.²¹ The ningyō have undergone a 'mermaidisation', with the traditional ningyō folklore undergoing its own hybridisation through contact with Western mermaid lore (including American Disneyfication) over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.²² The recent reporting of Amabie as a mermaid figure participates in this.

In parallel with the global spread of the Covid-19 virus, the viral dissemination of Amabie's apotropaic image has crossed national and cultural boundaries. This makes it interesting to compare it with the mermaid of European folklore. Since the Amabie is credited with the ability to repel pestilence as well as predict the future, it resembles a kind of mermaid deity. (A key concept associated with yōkai is kami, which can mean 'god' or deity'.²³) In European lore mermaids can also be seers. The mermaid's mirror, for example, often seen as a sign of vanity and sin, also represents the mermaid's ability to see through the veil that separates the visible and spirit worlds. There is even a canonised Irish mermaid: St Li-ban, who was caught in the net of Fergus of Miliuc.²⁴ Clerics gave her a choice, to be baptised and go to heaven within an hour, or to wait 300 years on earth. She chose to die; miracles were wrought through her and she became St Muirgen of Donegal.

Unlike Li-ban, Amabie, is disturbingly and inhumanly hybrid, its externally incoherent body resists any attempt to include it in systematic categorisation. Ningyō, the Japanese word for the human fish, has no gender. Amabie is also genderless, a departure from the stereotypical mythical mermaids who, siren-like, seduced sailors, causing shipwrecks. By contrast, the Orientalist imaginings of Asian 'mermaids' by westerners do resemble the uncanniness of Amabie. In his 1876 account, Nichols Belfield Denny recounts seeing the circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum's celebrated purchase (allegedly from Japanese sailors), which became known as the Fiji Mermaid.²⁵ She consisted of a monkey's body, joined to a fish's tail.²⁶ Mummified Japanese mermaids (ningyō mirra) were lined up by Europeans and Americans for exhibition at a price in the early to mid-nineteenth century.²⁷

One of the reasons why such hybrid creatures are unsettling in Western culture is because of the iconography surrounding demons. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, demons have their origins in the Fallen Angels who followed Satan when he was cast out of heaven. Descriptions from antiquity portray demons as shapeshifters who can assume any form, animal or human or hybrid. Because they are evil, they are imperfect, shown in flaws such as malformed limbs and cloven feet. Throughout the Christian era, the activities of demons have been thought to cause illness and disease. Demons can send bad weather, and pests such as armies of rats and mice, and swarms of locusts. Amabie, by contrast, wards off evil and presents us with a positive view of hybridity. The process of cross-fertilisation can, of course, create something new, more than the sum of the original parts.

Monsters and category crises

Cohen argues that, 'because of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at times of crisis', overturning binary thinking.²⁸ The propensity of Cohen's monsters to radically undermine taxonomic systems and refuse compartmentalisation of their monstrous qualities crucially rests on their hybridity; they demand a radical rethinking of boundaries and normality and are 'full of rebuke to traditional methods of organizing knowledge and human experience'.²⁹ For Cohen, 'The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis'; it refuses to participate in the classificatory 'order of things'.³⁰

Amabie contradicts this in several ways. It goes against the presuppositions of monsters as threatening and it challenges Cohen's notion of category crisis. Its very hybridity, rather than breaking down distinctions, is a constructive unification. The real monster is of course Covid-19, which renders individuals isolated and atomised before destroying them, whereas Amabie reaches out across the new media to unite them. Amabie does not exacerbate difference. She is akin to the new sympathetic monster of paranormal romance, though she is actively benevolent (in contrast to the tortured soul of the new kind of vampire, say, teetering on the edge of malignancy).

Catherine Spooner, discussing such figures in the Gothic of the new millennium, is more able to accommodate the comic or playful monster and defend it against those who see it as a dilution and contamination of the Gothic:

The idea that contemporary, postmodern forms of Gothic represent a diminution or a falling off from an earlier more rigorous form is common in Gothic Studies, espoused most prominently by Fred Botting, who … has argued repeatedly for a cultural exhaustion of present-day Gothic. Botting measures the success of Gothic by its powers of affect, and specifically its power to shock or frighten.³¹

Spooner argues that Gothic 'is not co-extensive with horror and cannot be reduced simply to its affective capabilities'.³² Thus, 'CoronaGothic' might be extended to include the yōkai's playfulness, embracing the tension between the fearful and comic, the repulsive and appealing.

The virality of the replication of Amabie's image through social media mirrors, as I have said, the spread of the pandemic itself, with a benevolent monster confronting a deadly and brutally inhuman one. Inserted between this there is at work another level of viral monstrosity, with the dissemination of dangerously mendacious hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and snake-oil cures across the very same media in which Amabie swims. And at a further level, in reaction to the democratically spontaneous adoption and circulation of the Amabie folklore into a unifying force, there is the cooption of this phenomenon by official agencies that is again viral. These four levels succeed each other and interact, exhibiting a dialectic between viral processes – a battle between monsters aligned with fragmentation on the one hand and unity on the other.

The monster returns

Cohen insists that the monster always escapes: rising from the dissection table like Frankenstein's Being as its secrets are about to be revealed, it vanishes into the night. Those interpreting the monster must then content themselves with 'fragments (footprints, bones, talismans, teeth, shadows … obscured glimpses – signifiers of monstrous passing that stand in for the monstrous body itself)'.³³ Amabie escaped into the sea, returning centuries later as a viral electronic image. Its power in the twenty-first century is apotropaic, tied to representation and reproduction, to the circulation of drawings and likenesses on the world-wide web amid a pandemic. Monsters such as Amabie do return; they ask us how we perceive the world. More importantly, as Cohen says, 'They ask us why we have created them?'³⁴ In this case, we have created a monster which is part of a revisionist Gothic in order to combat a truly terrorising monster that is not our creation and which has escaped our control.

Notes

Anime Draw Boxes to Capture Yokai

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/criq.12579

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