YAMISHIBAI'S YOKAI GALLERY...PART TWO!
Catch up with part one if you haven't, and enjoy another 30-ish monsters, with correct translations by Rev Storm!
LIVING MANNEQUIN
"A mannequin runs around a department store after it has closed. It seems like they continue to envy the people they see during the day and want to replace them."Just what it says, a plain old store mannequin that happens to be alive. Nothing remarkable design-wise, but a fun story hook!
KEN KEN PA PA PA PA
"If on the road you should happen to see an unnatural amount of ken ken pa circles, then you must not play it. For if you were to play..."This references a hopscotch-like children's game, and this entity's many legs probably make it exceptionally good at the game, or something like that. The fact that most of it consists of a balding, bucktoothed head with those bulging yellow eyes is especially unwholesome, though it keeps making me think of Gomez Addams for some reason. Maybe it's the thin mustache.
HAND-LEG BRAIDS
"Perhaps she wanders the school at night, in search of the braids she loves so dearly that were cut off."Surprisingly, I have already seen ghostly characters whose arms and legs are braided together. However, I've never seen one where each arm is braided to a leg like this. Coupled with the long hair hiding her face altogether, it's almost difficult at first glance to really parse what you're looking at - always a good thing to be able to say of a ghost design.
A BUNDLE OF PEOPLE
"They live mutually showing each other's anger. When one is angry the others share that anger."A man whose torso sort of branches and repeats like a bad glitch effect, with the heads all clustered together. A nice design twist here is how the "original" torso no longer has arms, but a couple of the other torsos each have one long arm to offer him!
THE HANGING FACES
"They see all that you hide and tattle on you. However, in order for all eight of them to be able to pass on the rumor, they are attached to a nonexistent branch."A creepy bundle of ghostly faces with legs, their scalps impaled on the same stick together! There is a pun here--the word for "branch" here can mean "unimportant details, side issue." So, they're telling you something that is both baseless and inconsequential.
STITCHING COUPLE
"They show up whenever there's a fight, and in order to patch things up they'll sew you together. But, you can save yourself by making the husband and wife fight."A simple but fun concept, a couple sewn together who seem to think this is why they get along so well...but I guess it doesn't work as well as they think.
ACHIRA'S FLOATS
"It is found celebrating humans getting lost in the other world. If you make eye contact, you will be added to the eternal procession."A parade float with a giant mouth. I like the pair of paper lanterns close enough to the mouth to evoke eyes, though the complete human face growing out of the top kind of distracts from that effect, if you ask me. It's a really funny concept though; sometimes people get trapped in the netherworld, and I guess this float manifests to throw a little festival for them.
GOLDFISH MAN
"Perched atop a human body, that goldfish body will continue to thrash until it is destroyed, just like when you're playing a goldfish catching game."This design would just be an unremarkable literal goldfish man if not for the eyes, which borrow from pop-eyed goldfish, obviously, but look more like actual human eyeballs do when popped all the way out. Don't look that up.
SWEET POTATO CATERPILLAR
"It is said that humans who have been parasitized will crawl into the dirt of their own accord, becoming the fertilizer for new sweet potatoes."These are wrapped up just like Japan's traditional street-food sweet potatoes, and even have a similar purple coloration, but you can see from their segmentation that something else is going on! I love the idea of sweet potatoes that act like human cordyceps. The Japanese name is actually a pun on "sweet potato" and the word for hornworm caterpillar!
100 YEARS DOLL
"Discarded dolls. It is said to suck the life out of the children who find them, and continues to live until it finds its original owner."We've all seen creepy, possessed dolls, but I especially love this one's terrifying, elderly ghoul face, still retaining big, watery doll eyes!
OLD MAN HANDSHAKES
"He will demand anyone he meets on the road at night shake his hand. You shouldn't say no, but the fourth person he meets absolutely must not refuse."This hunched being, with his enormous grinning mouth and oversized right hand, might actually be one of the scariest creatures here on the merits of the name translating to "OLD MAN HANDSHAKES." It's an interesting idea to have some terrible ghost that shows up for a handshake, and you just don't want to be the unlucky fourth one. This is because the word for "four" also sounds like "death" in Japanese.
MAN-FISH-MAN-FISH-MAN
"It has the head of a man, the body of a fish, the thighs of a man, the calves of a fish, and the legs of a man."I love this one's name, design and description. Literally a Man-fish-man-fish-man! I also love his howling, sleazy looking face.
MEAT SUCKER
"
Appears in human form to people who cheat on their spouses. When you reach in to give them a kiss, this face appears and sucks the meat off of you."It sounds like what we're seeing here is only what the head or face of this being looks like...like a wrinkly yam with three faces stacked atop each other, and all with protruding, puckered lips. Anything that sucks your flesh away is grisly to a rare degree.
THROUGH HUMANS
"It loves to play pranks. It will stick its hand in the butt of someone sitting on a toilet seat and out through their mouth."Oh god.
TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
"An old man with the brains of a good man and a bad man on top of his own brain. When he has the personality of a good person, he can solve all kinds of problems, but sometimes the bad person pretends to be a good person."Another where we're only seeing the face, but there's not much else to it; he's just got extra brains stacked atop his head! More than two, though. Three visible, and possibly a fourth inside his swollen cranium.
EAR HAIR FLYER
"If you don't listen to people and do whatever you want, your ears will be filled with hair and your neck will be torn off and fly off..."A disembodied head that flies with overgrown ear hair is pretty funny. This description however does not explain why there are four of them fused together like a horrible flying ear-hair centipede.
SHINKANSEN KODAMA
"The hands of the vengeful dead carry the spirits of those who wronged them to the beyond."Hard to tell what exactly is going on with the main "train" here. Most of it is one long worm-shaped guy, but then it has a second, more pained face bulging from its mouth as the front of the "car." I like the rows of giant hands ferrying it along, though, that's a pretty unique concept for an entity functioning like a subway. The name is a pretty funny joke, too; "shinkansen" is "bullet train," and going to Kodama is infamously slow because the train stops at every single stop along the way. It's all spelled out in kanji in an old-timey way, so that it basically means "spirits calling out to the assholes that got on their nerves."
HUMAN-FACE MANOR
"The place is so cheap, you can try asking the real estate agent if something happened here. He'll say no, but it's not because something didn't happen, it's because it IS a something."You hear "human-face manor" and you think you're gonna get a creepy mansion whose front door and windows form a face. Instead this building just has eyes and a nose on one of its side walls and forms a "mouth" by splitting open where its two floors meet. That's really original! The fact that it also has gigantic arms and legs breaking out of it is just a bonus. You don't get the impression it can actually get up and move, but might be trapped to its foundation.
THE WOMAN BEHIND YOU
"They grab your head from behind and ask you questions. The more you can't answer, the more she'll turn your head little by little..."I like this design a lot, how she has one giant muscly arm and her oversized head is twisted around so horribly. You expect a design like this to stretch the mouth, too, which I've seen a number of times, but it's even creepier that her mouth is left relatively normal.
TOAD WOMAN
"They live in water tanks and secrete oil from their bodies. Those who drink the water harbor frog eggs inside their bodies and lay eggs through their mouths."This one is QUALITY. The design is just this unsettlingly lopsided, person-shaped toad with a huge but still "human" mouth, and the description lets us know a lot more than we've learned about almost any of these other creatures. The body horror here is excellent, as it borrows unexpectedly from the real-world amphibians that brood or carry eggs in their mouths and throats.
I even really like that while her eyes are on top of her head like a proper toad, they're also clenched almost completely shut. Something about that is somehow scarier than if she had wide-open, cooler looking amphibian eyeballs. I guess it makes her smiling maw feel more forced.
THE CUCKOO CLOCK FROM BEYOND
"If you follow the pendulum movement of an old cuckoo clock with your eyes 49 times...."This is one of my favorites, because for one thing you've got this veiny bird fetus with eyeballs on the same side of its head, like a flatfish...unless it has four eyeballs in total?
Nah, I wanna go with the flatfish option. Two eyes on one side.
But what's also great about this one is that we do get to see what this description is referring to, when we get an extremely momentary glimpse in the series of a woman whose mouth has become this very cuckoo clock door. That is absolutely GHASTLY. It's that kind of surreal, more "preposterous" body horror that I think works so much better than more believable, gorier fates. We don't know what happens from there to a Cuckoo-Clocked victim, but being Cuckoo-Clocked is bad enough already.
WELCOMING HINA DOLL
"In a certain abandoned house is a hina doll with no owner. If a girl enters the house on March 3rd the doll with mistake her for its owner, and take her away to the world beyond.""Girl's Day" is a celebration for young girls in Japan that takes place on March 3rd, and hina dolls have traditionally been a big part of it. Simple, solid, freaky monster doll design, but the glimpse we get of this one in the show looks even cooler:
FACE SPIDER
"A spider with legs that are human faces. It is rumored to be a resident of a village that disappeared in a disaster a long time ago...""Head spiders" are a dime a dozen in horror media...but it usually means the spider's body is a human head. This is the first and only time I've ever seen a giant spider with a human head at the end of each leg. It doesn't even appear to have a spider's head or fangs on its actual body, either. It must look awkward as heck walking around, but in the most delightfully nightmarish way, I'm sure!
This creature gets full focus as an episode's main monster, too, when it terrorizes people trapped in their cars. It's all in the same tunnel that turns out to be infested with other human-shaped arthropods, which almost all share this same description.
THE FACE LADYBUG
"A ladybug with human faces on its wings. Rumor has it that it is a resident of a village that disappeared in a disaster long ago..."For this one, a giant ladybug has a human face for each of its polka dots, which is another novel concept completely new to me! We don't get to see it in action, it's just part of that final "there's even MORE freaky bugs!" ending twist.
THE FACE WORM
"A worm with a human-like face. Rumor has it that it is a resident of a village that disappeared in a disaster long ago..."There's something I always find particularly freaky about human-headed earthworms, for whatever reason. Maybe because earthworms are such soft, vulnerable and harmless creatures that can only eat dirt all day. It's a dignified life for a regular earthworm, but a pretty wretched fate for what was once a person.
There's also a subtle design detail here that sets it apart from just any other human-headed earthworm, and that's the different degrees to which which the worms in this pile are "protruding" or "contracting" their human faces in a realistically wormish fashion.
FACE CENTIPEDE
"A centipede with a human face on its body. Rumor has it that it is an inhabitant of a village that disappeared in a disaster long ago.""A human head on its body" is a poor translation, but I'm leaving it because I find it a little cute as the description for a centipede made of human heads, one as each segment, each erupting from the mouth of the one behind it. The legs emerging from the ears and the antennae emerging from the front head's mouth also imply there's more of an actual centipede body on the inside of this thing, perhaps.
BUG-EYE BIRD
"You can't see it, because it holds your head in place with its mouth. If you say "don't eat me don't eat me don't eat me" it will disappear."
"I love this goofy, giant invisible bird that apparently just stands behind you and starts to eat your head. It almost looks like a fat, neckless shoebill, but from the beak up, its big bald head looks distressingly human.
THIRTEEN BELLIES
"Wanders the streets at night saying "Let me eat your arms" or "Let me eat your eyes." Every time you refuse another step is added to its stomach, and when they hit thirteen...."In English, we say that someone has a "double chin," but in Japan, it's "three bellies." This is an awfully disquieting description...what DOES happen on the thirteenth belly?!
REVERSE LUNCH MONITOR
"They come to collect what's already inside your body, and take it away to the world beyond..."Just two pale children, carrying a bucket of blood together, with their heads bent completely back behind them. Why is this one of the scariest images in the whole set?! A lunch monitor is someone who would distribute food, but the "reverse," of course, is taking something back.
MAN CATCHER PIG
"Lures people in with visions depicted in smoke, then burns them inside it. It's said that those visions are of the lives they would have lead."This is one of those pig-shaped clay incense burners, which in Japan are actually called "mosquito catcher" pigs! You can see this monster version has a creepy, humanoid face on its underside, a pretty unique place to put it, and this is another like the Toad Woman that tells you precisely what happens. Really loving this concept of a predatory incense pig. Top-notch! Would have deserved an episode, but Yamishibai's seasons are quite short.
GUT DRAWER
"Draws out the guts of anyone sitting in front of it. Those who've had their guts drawn out just appear to be sleeping."We see nothing here but two googly eyes peering from the darkness of a school desk, and somehow that's already my favorite design here. The fact that it quietly, secretly steals all your viscera without alerting anybody, meanwhile, is another of the scariest concepts presented on this entire page. Could not have done better myself.
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