Also written: youkai, ayakashi
The spirits, monsters and uncanny creatures of Japanese folklore, and one of manga's richest sources of material. Read from the inquiry, as a 7.
7Seven — inquiry. That is the reduction of this term, and the shelf it is read from.
Yokai (妖怪) is a broad word for the supernatural beings of Japanese folklore: shape-shifting foxes and raccoon dogs, kappa in rivers, long-necked women, umbrellas that come to life, and hundreds more. Some are dangerous, some mischievous, some merely odd.
Many yokai took visual form in the Edo period, when artists such as Toriyama Sekien published illustrated catalogues of them. In the twentieth century, Shigeru Mizuki's manga and encyclopaedias gave them their modern look, and his designs are what many Japanese readers picture when they hear the names.
Yokai appear across genres: as monsters to be fought in action series, as companions in comedies, as metaphors in quieter stories. GeGeGe no Kitarō, Inuyasha and the mushi of Mushishi, which borrow the logic of yokai without the folklore, show the range.
Yokai give manga a shared, recognisable vocabulary of the uncanny, much as Greek myth does for Western fiction. A reader who knows the main ones will catch references, puns and designs in a great many series.
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 25, which folds down to 7.
What the 7 brings is inquiry. The reference files it as an open question. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 7's pull toward the hidden and the unresolved.
The vowels alone reduce to 7, the consonants to 9. The presentation folds back into the want: reckoning in service of inquiry.
The 7 asks you to sit with the part that was never explained. The 7 mistakes withholding for depth. Some works filed here are obscure because they are unfinished, not because they are deep. The other entries that reduce to 7 are collected on The Inquiry.