Emaki

An emaki is a scroll read right to left, picture and text alternating or picture alone, unrolled an arm’s length at a time. The oldest yokai pictures that survive are in scrolls: the Hyakki Yagyō Emaki in Shinjuan, Kyoto, from the sixteenth century, with its parade of walking tools; the Shuten-dōji scrolls from the fourteenth century on; the Tsuchigumo Zōshi; the Tsukumogami-ki. Edo collectors commissioned copies and new sets, and the bakemono-zukushi scroll, a row of named monsters with no story, became a genre of its own.

The Inō Mononoke-roku scrolls record a month of apparitions in a house in Bingo in 1749, one a night. The library of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies holds a Yōkai Emaki in which the walking straw sandal makes one of its earliest appearances.