The changing cat, and the best known of Japan’s cat yokai.
The two-tailed cat, usually distinguished from the bakeneko by its split tail and its greater age and power.
The fox, which of Japan’s uncanny beings lives closest to people.
The Japanese raccoon dog, and the shape-changer the old records make of it.
The serpent woman.
The long-necked woman of Japanese legend.
The detaching head.
The object spirits.
First of all the name of a bird — toratsugumi, White’s thrush, whose thin descending call at night is recorded in a chronicle of 712 and used by the Man’yōshū poets as a fixed figure for weeping that is kept inside.
The giant skeleton — the one that rattles as it walks, with the eyes still in the sockets.
The one-wheeled cart that passes on a village road at night with nobody pulling it.
The returning dead.
The living spirit — the ghost of someone who is not dead.
The vengeful spirit of the dead.
The august spirits: wronged dead who were not merely appeased but enshrined and worshipped as gods.
Usually translated as the Japanese god of death, and the one thing it has never had is a cult.
The woman met at night who asks a passer-by to hold her child.
The snow woman: a figure in white seen in deep snow, usually at a distance and usually without consequence.
The river child.
Two characters borrowed from Chinese astronomy, where they named a kind of meteor, and first written in Japan in 637 for a noise that crossed the sky.
The thing that comes alongside a boat at night and asks to borrow something.
The sea monk: a great figure that rises beside a boat at night and speaks to the crew.
The palace under the sea, and the stories of people taken to it.
The man-eaters.
Usually given in English as demon or ogre.
The woman of the mountains, rendered in English as mountain witch or mountain crone.
Usually translated as curse, though the translation is late.
The thing that attaches.
The dog-god: not a creature that appears to anyone, but something a household was said to keep and to pass on with its property.
Earth-spider: two characters that the eighth-century court applied to local chiefs it had not subdued, one at a time, in passages always set long ago.
A man of Hida in the eighth-century chronicle, described as having two faces on one trunk, who would not obey the court and was killed by a general sent against him.
The child that lives in the good room of an old house.
The things sold and given at the turning of the year: the arrow with no bow, the rake, the painted board.
The night parade of a hundred demons — known now as a painted scroll, but in the writing that precedes the paintings it does three other things.
The Japanese giant salamander, and the shrine that was built for one.
The living hell: not the place you go afterwards but a place on the map, at a known altitude, that pilgrims climbed up to look into.
Foxfire, and the other strange fires it was catalogued alongside.
Disturbances in a house: objects moving, stones falling, sounds with no source.
The god, or monster, of the privy.
The grime-licker, said to live in old bathhouses.
The drawing of threads: fine filaments that appear at the fingertips of a believer making reverence before the written name of Amida.
The blood ceiling: boards overhead that were once the floor of a room where men killed themselves, showing the marks of their hands and feet.
The ghost photograph.
A divination done with three bamboo sticks and a pot lid, with the hands resting on top; the lid tilts, and the tilts are the answers.
One who brings Inari down — a medium who works by having the fox deity enter them, and who prays on a client’s behalf.
The numinous dream — a dream that announces something the dreamer could not have known.
The shrine maiden, and before that the medium: the woman who lends her mouth to gods and to the dead.
The diviners of the Japanese court, and civil servants before anything else.
The Way of Yin and Yang: the body of practice behind the onmyōji’s office, synthesizing Chinese cosmology, Buddhist mysticism, and native ritual.
The human pillar.
A divination done with three bamboo sticks and a pot lid, with the hands resting on top; the lid tilts, and the tilts are the answers.
Entering the ground alive: a monk has a pit dug, goes down into it in meditation, and does not come out.
The queen of Wa, set up as ruler by countries that had been at war with one another, and known from a single short passage in the court histories of third-century China.
The most famous diviner of the Heian court, active around the turn of the eleventh century, and the figure around whom the largest body of onmyōdō legend gathered — a fox-born boy in the later tellings, a court astrologer in the records.
The monk who brought the esoteric teaching home from Tang China, born in Sanuki in 774; known for eleven centuries afterwards as Kōbō Daishi, the figure who comes to a door and asks for water.
Every tale on this shelf reaches us through a decision by somebody to record it: an anonymous compiler working in the script of clerks, a parlour game that required a hundred strange things a night, a philosopher who set the beliefs down exactly in order to be rid of them, a civil servant who promised to change not one word, a foreign writer who named two of his sources and not the rest.