鳥山石燕（とりやませきえん）
Toriyama Sekien
The Edo artist (1712–1788) whose four picture books fixed the look of over two hundred yokai.
Sekien was a painter trained in the Kanō school and a teacher of printmakers; Kitagawa Utamaro studied with him. Between 1776 and 1784 he published four illustrated books of yokai, one creature to a page with a name and sometimes a line of comment: Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, Konjaku Hyakki Shūi and Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro. Together they hold more than two hundred figures.
He drew what people already knew, from older scrolls like the Hyakkai Zukan, and he drew things nobody had seen before: puns, allusions to Chinese books, jokes about his own trade. Many yokai that look ancient appear for the first time on his pages, with no story and no place. This site marks that in every article where it applies, because the question of whether a yokai was ever more than Sekien’s drawing is one of the most interesting it can ask.
Related yokai
Akaname
垢嘗（あかなめ）
Sekien drew a crouching figure with a long tongue in a bathhouse in 1776 and called it the grime-licker. He wrote nothing else about it — and everything you have been told about dirty bathrooms was added afterwards.
Tenome
手の目（てのめ）
Sekien's 1776 plate shows an elderly blind figure with a biwa on his back, holding out two palms, each with an open eye. He gave it a name and nothing more; the story of a murdered man hunting his killer came later.
Shōkera
しょうけら
Sekien drew Shōkera in 1776 as a clawed, long-limbed figure clinging to a roof and peering in through the skylight. The plate gives a name and nothing else: no purpose, no victim, no reason it is looking.
Kawa-akago
川赤子（かわあかご）
Toriyama Sekien drew an infant-shaped creature rising from the water plants of a mountain river in 1779, watching a man on a raft — and admitted in the caption that he was guessing about what it was.
Keukegen
毛羽毛現（けうけげん）
Sekien drew Keukegen in 1781 as a small creature covered in long hair, and spent his caption on its name — which, written another way, means rarely there and rarely seen. The damp houses and disease came later.
Biwa-bokuboku
琵琶牧々（びわぼくぼく）
In 1784 Sekien drew a blind biwa priest with a biwa for a head, feeling his way under a willow. His caption names two legendary court lutes, Genjō and Bokuba, and builds the creature's name out of one of them.