The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia ebook

by Richard Freeman

Richard Freeman Biological Sciences English

Japan has a wealth of ghosts and monsters, collectively called yokai, which are totally unknown in the West.

Everyone has heard of vampires and werewolves, but how many have heard of the rokuro-kubi, the tsuchinoki or the sagari? Japan has a wealth of ghosts and monsters, collectively called yokai, which are totally unknown in the West. The bizarre and wonderful folklore of Japan includes giant corpse-eating rabbits, flaming pigs that steal human genitals, perverse water goblins, blood sucking trees, a dragon that impregnates women, cats who animate dead bodies, a zombie whale and a huge flesh eating sea cucumber that grows from a pair of discarded knickers!

The Great Yokai Encyclopedia had new yokai that I have never known about before. I certainly did. I would recommend The Great Yokai Encyclopedia to anyone interested in Japanese mythology, or even just mythology in general. 3 people found this helpful.

The Great Yokai Encyclopedia had new yokai that I have never known about before. As soon as I opened up the book, i could tell that i would cherish it forever.

The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia book. Details (if other): Cancel. Thanks for telling us about the problem. The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia. by. Richard Freeman (Goodreads Author).

Richard Freeman (born 1970) is a cryptozoologist, author . The Great Yokai Encyclopedia; an A to Z of Japanese Monsters (CFZ Press, Bideford, 2010).

Richard Freeman (born 1970) is a cryptozoologist, author, zoological journalist, and WebTV Presenter. Orang-pendek: Sumatra's Forgotten Ape (CFZ Press, Bideford, 2011).

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia by Richard Freeman . The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore by Michael Dylan Foster (Paperback, 2014).

The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore by Michael Dylan Foster (Paperback, 2014). The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons: A Field Guide to Japanese Yokai by MR Matthew Meyer (Paperback, softback, 2015).

Herpetologist (reptiles) former zookeeper,Author of 'Dragons;More Than A Myth?','Explore Dragons' and 'The Great Yokai Encyclopedia; An A to Z of Japanese Monsters; Orang-pendek, Sumatra's Forgotten Ape. Goth, Dr Who fan, book collector. Do not despise the snake because he has no horns.

The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia. Japan has a wealth of ghosts and monsters, collectively called yokai, which are totally unknown in the West. The bizarre and wonderful folklore of Japan includes giant corpse-eating rabbits, flaming pigs that steal human genitals, perverse water goblins, blood sucking trees, a dragon that impregnates women, cats who animate dead bodies, a zombie whale and a huge flesh eating sea cucumber that grows from a pair of discarded knickers!

Richard Freeman (born 1970) is a cryptozoologist, author, zoological . The orangutans are three extant species of great apes native to Indonesia and Malaysia

Richard Freeman (born 1970) is a cryptozoologist, author, zoological journalist, and WebTV Presenter. Freeman has written, co-writ. The orangutans are three extant species of great apes native to Indonesia and Malaysia. Orangutans are currently only found in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra.

Bliss

This book is absolutely stunning. I've always loves yokai and have collected as many books as I can on the subject, and this one is by far my favorite because it is so cohesive and includes many, many types that I haven't read about in my other books. There are two downsides I've stumbled across, one being that some information contradicts other books I've read (which with a subject like yokai is fairly forgivable because legends do evolve) and the more.... I'd say 'upsetting' one is how some of the images were handled. Many look wonderful, I'd say the majority are great, but some look as though they were small images stretched to fill whole or half pages when they shouldn't have been, and that left them pixelated. None so badly you can't see what they are, but a few distractingly so. That is the only reason I felt I had to take away one star.

Beyond that, the information is amazing and opened the door to many yokai I'd never heard about and that was the entire purpose for me. If you read about one you really do like, I'd recommend just looking them up separately to make sure the information is correct. It works perfectly as a starting point, and a beautiful starting point at that. Even with the handful of pixel-images, it's still probably the prettiest yokai-related book on my shelf.

Jwalextell

A well researched book, densely populated with weird and interesting entries. I discovered more yokai than I had imagined existed. The essays on the more popular Japanese spirit folk--kappa, kitsune, tengu, &c.--are delightfully lengthy, but just as interesting are the more obscure yokai listed here, such as a monk made of ash, a microscopic viral boar, or a giant sea cucumber born from a girl's discarded underclothes. This book is dense with legendary creatures, the entries including any relevant folklore whenever possible.

Although the amount of text is admirable (if not sometimes a little glib), the design of the book is a little disappointing. It's illustrated throughout, but often the works shown (most of them Edo period prints) are pixelated, as if they had been lifted off the web from a Wikipedia article. The original illustrations by Anthony Wallis are reproduced well, but his pictures sometimes pale next to those of Kuniyoshi and other Japanese printmakers. (Also--and I realize this is a huge nitpick--the designers used a title font in the book that does not include all of the glyphs used in yokai names, so occasionally an special character appears in the middle of a heading in a different typeface than the rest of the word. It looks sloppy.)

Still, I purchased this book hoping to learn more about yokai, especially the obscure ones I could not find in other books or the internet, and in that sense, this book really delivers. A solid reference for those interested in the weird critters and beings that inhabit Japan's folk tales.

Macage

Extensively researched and thorough.

Jonide

This book is filled with a bunch of fascinating facts about tons of yokai and I learned things I didn't know before. It is a perfect book for yokai fanatics everywhere!

RuTGamer

I read it and I don't like the formatting too much, reading the beginning says that costs were cut to keep the price low, so I guess I understand.

Wizer

The Great Yokai Encyclopedia had new yokai that I have never known about before. As soon as I opened up the book, i could tell that i would cherish it forever. I do agree with the following reviews that this book doesn't have an index to help the reader search for a certain species of yokai and some of the pictures are hard to tell which yokai it is (unless you start reading each creature's infomation to match the written description to the picture which can take some time). But, it is a good book if you have alot of imagination and if you don't mind this weird format.

Usaxma

All mythologies contain strange creatures, but the record holder for most strange creatures of all must surely be the mythology of Japan.

After an introduction telling a bit about Japanese history and the appearance of Japanese mythological themes in popular culture, this book goes on to list literally hundreds of different mythological creatures in alphabetical order.

Yokai is a broad term referring to any mythological creature from Japan. Some of the yokai may be familiar to a number of people, such as the Kappa, a cucumber-loving water monster that tears out people's bowels through their anus; the Oni, Japan's answer to ogres and trolls; the Tatsu, the dragons of Japan; the Tengu, supernatural birdmen; and so on.
Others may be a lot less well known, such as the Atsuuikakura, a giant flesh-eating sea cucumber that grows from the undergarments of a dead girl; the Bake-Kujira, a skeletal phantom whale; the Basan, a fire-breathing rooster; the Gashadokuro, a giant animated skeleton; the Katakiruwa, a one-eared flaming pig that steals souls and renders people impotent; the Mouryo, a big bipedal rabbit that eats corpses; and much, much more.
The book does not appear to leave out any yokai. Even the most obscure and little known ones get an entry, even its just a small entry.
A few of the yokai are briefly compared to similar creatures from other mythologies in the world, which helps provide some quite interesting extra info.

Some of the yokai are known to be real animals that the old tales have bestowed with supernatural qualities. The tanuki (racoon dog), for instance, is a primitive type of dog that the legends bestow with sentience, shape-shifting and scrotum enlarging abilities (and no, I am not just joking about the last one).
Also, some yokai could be real animals still officially undiscovered by science. Examples of these include the ape-like Hibagon, the lake monster Issie, and the flattened snake Tsuchinoko.

The book is well organised and pays a lot of attention to detail. I think most people reading it would end up learning a lot that they didn't know before. I certainly did.
I would recommend The Great Yokai Encyclopedia to anyone interested in Japanese mythology, or even just mythology in general.