Snowblood

Chapter 16: Yokai

Back at the ryokan, after a delicious meal, half of which Kari couldn't identify, she retired to her room, where she looked up Abe Hiroshi. She had to admit she could understand why Yukie had had a crush on him back in the day and maybe even still a little now. Why weren't there more Asian leading men in American movies and TV shows?

Yet—how long ago had 'back in the day' been for Yukie? Abe Hiroshi was now in his fifties. Of course, that didn't mean anything. You could have a crush on somebody who died before you were born, or somebody who never even existed, like a fictional character. But would you also know so much about what fan magazines—teen magazines—said about him? If Yukie had been age appropriate for those magazines when Abe Hiroshi was a teen girl's 'Ideal Boyfriend', then she was...over forty?

Huh.

After that, she looked online for a book about Japanese ghosts, and found an e-book translated into English that was something like a field guide to them and to other supernatural Japanese creatures called yokai. All ghosts were yokai, it seemed, but not all yokai were ghosts. It was like a logic statement. But what exactly was a yokai?

In kanji, the word was written with two characters, 'bewitching' and 'mysterious'. So: a yokai was something, anything, bewitching and mysterious. They were the things that went bump in the night, the monsters hiding in the closet, the footsteps that followed you down a dark street—but when you turned to see who it was, no one and nothing was there. Yet they were more than just boogeymen. Some were animals which had supernatural powers and human intelligence, like kitsune and bakemono, shape-shifting foxes and cats. Then there were oni, which were something like an ogre or a demon, and tsukumogami, everyday objects which came to life after being used long enough.

There were nature spirits and semidivine creatures, like the kirin, which was something like a unicorn, and ones which were partly human or who had once been human—like the Yuki-Onna. Only one of them sounded anything like a chimaera, the nue, which was a composite of several animals. No, these weren't chimaeras. Yokai, strange to say, were people. People who weren't human, true, but people.

"I bet they'd think you were a yokai," she said to Boo, who was sitting at the window, looking down at something she couldn't see. Every so often, he would paw at the glass and make a little cry. He had stuffed himself on fresh raw scallops at dinner, giving her the feeling she ought to be worried that he would scorn mice and goldfish when they got home.

When she spoke, he turned his head all the way around, owl-fashion, to look at her when she spoke, but then he went back to staring out the window. "Something out there sure is fascinating you, huh?"

Soon Kari forgot about ghosts as she read up on creatures like the kappa, a water spirit with a taste for both cucumbers and human entrails. However, it was so polite that if you bowed to it, it bowed back, spilling the water atop its head that was the source of its strength, so then you could defeat it. There were haunted futons, teapots that could turn into badgers, or vice versa, and nearly a hundred others...Kari could feel she was getting sleepy, so she found the section on Yuki-Onna and read that before she turned off the lights.

Yuki-Onna had more powers than were revealed in Kwaidan, it seemed. In addition to the cold-based powers one would expect, like causing blizzards, throwing icicles as missiles, and flash-freezing victims by breathing on them, they were also able to either create illusions out of snow and ice or cloud people's minds to lead them astray to their deaths. Perhaps both? They were also strong enough to pick up a man bigger than they were and lift him up over their heads to throw him around, if necessary. When they transformed into a gust of wind, they were invisible and imperceptible, except as a blast of icy cold air. Some accounts said they stole a victim's life essence when they froze them solid.