和漢三才図会（わかんさんさいずえ）
Wakan Sansai Zue
The illustrated encyclopaedia of 1712, where strange animals sit beside ordinary ones.
Terajima Ryōan, an Osaka physician, compiled his encyclopaedia of Japan and China in 105 volumes, finished around 1712, on the model of a Chinese work of a century earlier. It is arranged by heaven, earth and humanity, with a woodcut for nearly every entry, and its animal volumes do not separate the real from the legendary: the hihi, the giant mountain ape that laughs and carries off women, is entered among the apes; the ningyo among the fish; the shin, the clam that breathes mirages, among the shellfish; dragons and serpents have a volume to themselves.
Because it gives each creature a description and often a Chinese source, the Wakan Sansai Zue is where many yokai acquire a natural history, and Sekien drew on it for his third book.
Related yokai
Hihi
狒々（ひひ）
A 1712 Japanese encyclopedia compiled older Chinese descriptions of a black-haired, long-lipped creature that laughs when it sees a person — and whose upper lip then rolls up over its own eyes.
Ningyo
人魚（にんぎょ）
The Japanese ningyo of the old illustrated encyclopedias is not a mermaid — it is a fish body carrying a human face, with no arms and nothing to seduce anyone with. The famous story attached to it is not about romance either.
Shin
蜃（しん）
Old records describe a creature at the coast whose breath rises over the water and takes the shape of towers. The sources never agreed on what it was — and the Japanese word for a mirage is still its name.
Hakutaku
白澤（はくたく）
A beast from Chinese legend that named every harmful thing in the world for the Yellow Emperor, and whose image — nine eyes, six horns, a human face — was carried by Edo travelers and set beside pillows during the cholera epidemic of 1858.
Kirin
麒麟（きりん）
The kirin is an auspicious beast of Chinese origin, shown in Japanese art from the eighth century: deer-bodied, one-horned, and said to appear only when the world is well governed. It harms no living thing — not even the grass.