Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore > Status Update

The kappa is associated with water, usually rivers, ponds, and swamps. It is one of the most famous of all yōkai in Japan. Different legends and beliefs about it are distributed throughout the country, but generally speaking, the kappa is thought of as scaly or slimy, greenish in color, with webbed feet and hands, and a carapace on its back.

The word tsuchigumo, literally "earth spider," seems to have been used as a derogatory and demonizing label for the indigenous inhabitants of Japan. That is, the people writing the texts used the term negatively to describe the natives they were conquering; they portrayed them as having short bodies and long arms and legs, and as living in holes in the ground.

Strictly speaking, setsubun refers to a "joint" in the year when one season changes into another [...], much like New Year's Eve, a dividing point between the old year and the new and therefore a ritually meaningful moment of transition. This is a crack in the flow of time, a potentially dangerous bridge between one period and another, during which both good and bad spirits might enter.

It is said that when a tree reaches the age of one hundred, it has a kami that will show its form.

Part II: Yōkai Codex

One question often asked about yōkai is whether people actually believe in them. [...] Implicit in a question like this, however, is the assumption that there are only two possibilities—belief or doubt. One thing yōkai teach us is that between belief and doubt, between the literal and the metaphorical, lies a zone of ambiguity that is fertile ground for the imagination.

Yōkai begin where language ends.

One common characteristic of yōkai is their liminality, or "in-between-ness." They 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 often appear at twilight, that gray time when the familiar seems strange and faces become indistinguishable. They haunt bridges and tunnels, entranceways and thresholds.