This excellent monograph looks at a key supernatural being, the oni, sometimes translated into English as “demon” or “ogre” but who, as the author shows, is too complex a character to be so facilely compared with figures in Western demonology. As a major denizen of Japanese folklore and, more recently, in Japan's pop cultural mass media, the oni are portrayed as ambiguous creatures living on the margins, symbolizing the other, and embodying hybridity—an existence emerging from such disparate sources as Buddhist cosmology, yin/yang thought, Chinese literature, and the Japanese popular imagination. The book offers a rich cultural survey of the oni myth down through Japanese history beginning with a lucidly written overview, “What are Oni?,” and followed by chapters covering the major folk religious and literary expressions as Shuten Doji (the Drunken Demon), Yamauba, the Mountain Ogress, urban oni, the use of the oni figure to symbolize the foreign enemies of the Japanese empire in the modern period, and oni in manga, anime, and film. Throughout, the author asks how belief in oni functions in the lives of Japanese throughout history, and finds that the common denominator is “the stigma of ‘other’ that oni seem to have carried about them from the start.” Well researched and written, this book would work well in the classroom for looking at Japanese folk religion and contemporary pop culture.
