Night Procession of Goblins (Hyakki yagyo no zu)

The hyakki yagyō—the "night parade of one hundred demons"—is one of the oldest and most beloved themes in Japanese art, a nocturnal procession of yōkai: goblins, spirits, and animated objects that spill out to roam the darkened world. Painters had treated the subject for centuries, and it offered exactly the mixture of the eerie and the absurd in which Kawanabe Kyōsai excelled.

Here Kyōsai turns his brush to that teeming supernatural crowd, a subject that rewards both imaginative invention and comic timing. The yōkai tradition is inherently caricatural—each creature a grotesque exaggeration, each face a joke about fear itself—and it let an artist of Kyōsai's range be frightening and funny in the same stroke.

Work of this kind places Kyōsai firmly in the lineage that runs toward manga: monsters rendered with personality and wit, drawn from a deep well of folklore that later generations of Japanese cartoonists and animators would mine again and again.