Yōkai, the monsters of Japanese tradition, also arrive in Florence, at the Museo degli Innocenti

Vertigo Syndrome brings to Florence the Yōkai. Monsters of Japanese Tradition: from June 13 to November 3, 2024 they will arrive in the exhibition spaces of the Museo degli Innocenti, on the occasion of the exhibition Yōkai. Monsters, Spirits and Other Unrest in Japanese Prints. After having been featured in Monza and Bologna, Yōkai will now arrive in the Tuscan capital with a new exhibition, featuring hundreds of works never exhibited before and two new curators: Paola Scrolavezza, among the leading nipponists in Italy and director of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bologna, and Eddy Wertheim, director of the Japanese Gallery Kensington in London. The Florentine exhibition returns to offer the public the world of monsters in the Japanese tradition through more than one hundred and fifty works from the 18th and 19th centuries, including still unpublished antique prints, rare books, masks, and weapons and armor on loan from the Stibbert Museum in Florence.

In the early 17th century, the Edo era ushered in a period of peace and stability in Japan characterized by the policy of sakoku, the “closed country,” designed to prevent any contact with the West, strict political and social control, and profound economic imbalances. In artistic production, both figurative and literary, the aesthetics of “twilight,” suitable for giving voice to this era of transformation, became established. The yōkai and yūrei, the monsters and spirits that have populated Japanese legends since their origins, perfectly embody feelings, anxieties, fears and desires that are the result of this precise historical moment. Here are the odokuro, giant hungry skeletons, the bakeneko, monstrous cats, the kappa, aquatic beings that pester vessels, the kitsune, comely fox-women, beginning to be depicted by famous artists thus invading ukiyoe prints, where they mingle with the scenes and spaces of everyday life to tell the story of the re-emergence of all that is sought to hide, control and regulate: the fear of the night, with the shadows that lurk in the streets or in the countryside forgotten by the process of urbanization; the passions that explode uncontrolled and defy rigid codes of behavior; the menace of creatures that hide at the bottom of rivers and return to reclaim the space and time of nature that man tries to govern.

The exhibition opens with an immersive room intended to make visitors relive the experience of the samurai’s most legendary test of courage: the ritual of 100 candles. In the same way as the samurai, visitors will enter a totally dark room, illuminated only by the dim light of one hundred candles that, in a play of mirrors will appear to multiply and cast flickering red shadows on faces. The candles will then go out one by one, accompanied by the hoarse voice of the ghost of an old samurai, who died after going mad from encountering a real monstrous yōkai in the night. Once out of the hall of a hundred candles, visitors will encounter the monster prints, surprised by voices, sounds, hoarse sudden tales, and evocations that will enact the fear of the ancient samurai.

From the traditional figures of bakemono and yūrei crystallized in ukiyoe prints of the Edo period (1603-1868) to the esoteric-apocalyptic exoskeletons of Evangelion, to the parade of Pokémon, to the creepy protagonists of J-Horror and cyberpunk, to the super-flat monsters of Murakami Takashi and the urban aesthetic of monster kawaii, the monstrous retains its exceptional energy and continues to assert itself as a privileged symbol of a culture perceived as constantly changing. The word yōkai is composed of two characters, 妖 (yō) and 怪 (kai): the former suggests charm, enchantment; the latter means appearance, mystery. Japan is the land of eight thousand gods, because every natural element but also every object born of human genius or labor can contain a spark of the divine. Japanese culture is thus steeped in a form of spirituality already predisposed to the proliferation of creatures that arise from the intersection of the fantastic, religion and everyday life.

Introducing the exhibition will be a selection of prints by masters such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) and Utagawa Toyokuni III (1786-1865) that will immerse visitors in the teeming atmospheres of life and pleasures of the Tokugawa era, while concluding it will be a plunge into one of the most beloved stories of the latter part of the period, the Nansō satomi hakkenden by Takizawa Bakin (1767-1848), a famous river novel in one hundred and six volumes written between 1814 and 1842, translated into pictures by Utagawa Yoshitaki (1841-1899) and Utagawa Toyokuni III. In the section Trepidation-Traveling with Fantasy, we find The Extermination of Demons by Momotarō, attributed to Katsushika Hokusai or his school. The print depicts one of the most iconic moments in Momotarō’s famous Japanese fairy tale, the “pèsca child” who succeeds in defeating the terrible oni, mythological creatures similar to demons and ogres, on the island of Onigashima, handing it back to the lord of the place. Again, on display here is Shoki capturing a demon in a dream, a work from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s series The New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts, in which the artist, considered the last great master of ukiyoe, illustrated thirty-six of his favorite tales inspired by Japanese stories and legends, with his peculiar style that made the works terrifying. From Katsushika Hokusai ’s never-completed Hundred Ghost Stories series comes the famous print The Sneer of the Demon Woman, in which the master takes up an ’ancient Buddhist legend about Hariti, a terrifying ogress determined to eat all the children in the town of Rajgir, India. The story ends with the conversion of the fearsome ogress into a benevolent deity, protector of children, but Hokusai chooses to portray her in her most frightening version, making her a symbol of the dark side of the feminine and the threat it poses to male power. It was out of the need to stem this threat that the deeply patriarchal culture of ancient Japan spawned countless tales starring old witches devouring men victimized by their clever deceptions, vengeful ghosts and cruel demons hiding behind the features of beautiful and seductive maidens. Ghostly characters were very present in kabuki theater performances, and woodcut artists were inspired precisely by the theatrical dramas to immortalize them in many of their works. In fact, one room of the exhibition is titled In the Theater to Exorcise Fears. This includes, for example, Toyokuni III Utagawa ’s triptychs from some of the most popular dramas of the time such as Meiboku sendai hagi, written around 1780. The play was based on real events that took place in the 17th century: a dispute over succession within a family of military lineage.

The exhibition benefits from the invaluable collaboration of the Stibbert Museum in Florence, which is lending for the occasion a nucleus consisting of two samurai suits of armor, one of them dating from 1738 and built by Myōchin Muneakira, Japan’s most skilled lorica craftsman of the Edo period, as well as helmets and ancient tachi swords, long and curved, used mainly by the nobility on horseback. The pieces come from the Stibbert’s treasured Japanese armory, among the richest in the world, which boasts specimens from the period of the so-called Sengoku jidai, the era of the country at war, when from the 15th century onward, in a world dominated by the fear of death, the warrior himself became a yōkai.

Yōkai. Monsters, Spirits and Other Unrests in Japanese Prints presents an “exhibition within an exhibition” with a selection of works created especially for the occasion by young contemporary artists or artists. The unpublished plates are by illustrator Giulia Rosa, who has chosen to narrate life, relationships, love and other everyday existential crises we all face by being inspired by the fabulous world of yōkai. The exhibition is rounded out with a selection of contemporary illustrations, posters, and playbills created for today’s anime, from Son Goku, the iconic protagonist of the Dragon Ball animated series, to GeGeGe no Kitarō, Pom Poko , and the worldwide hit Demon Slayer. Masterpieces by Miyazaki Hayao, Toriyama Akira and other great creators show how the aesthetics of the grotesque and monstrous, which has pervaded Japanese culture since its origins, is still an undisputed protagonist in visual art today.

In addition, the exhibition is suitable for children and young people. In fact, all children will be greeted by an invitation to participate in a treasure hunt within the exhibition halls to find traces left by a fictional Ambrose, a yōkai explorer, who needs their help. At the end of the treasure hunt, each child will receive one of ten coveted treasure hunter pins depicting a yōkai as a prize. Instead, in one of the exhibition spaces, a game room filled with monsters to color, a card game where each child can create his or her own personal yōkai, and a scenery for the yōkai received as gifts to run around in will be created.

For schools and summer campuses, both classic guided tours and game tours with a hunt for the “golden yōkai” inside the Hall of a Hundred Candles will be planned.

For info and presale: www.mostrigiapponesi.it

Hours: Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Image: Kunichika Toyohara, Kabuki Theater Opera, Zenaku Ryomen Ko no Tegashiwa (1867; polychrome woodcuts on mulberry paper, 35.2 x 23 cm, 35.4 x 23.2 cm, 35.3 x 23 cm; London, Japanese Gallery Kensington)

Yōkai, the monsters of Japanese tradition, also arrive in Florence, at the Museo degli Innocenti

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