Monstrous Dreams:
Yōkai of Japan

A thirty-year conversation with Japan's ecology of the monstrous

For most of my life I have been drawn to monsters — not as simple embodiments of fear, but as figures that disturb categorical certainty. My childhood fascination with Gothic cinema gave me a Western vocabulary of the uncanny: vampires, werewolves, stitched-together corpses animated by electricity. These creatures were moralized and narratively contained.

When I began living in Japan, I encountered an entirely different ecology of the monstrous. Yōkai were neither strictly evil nor wholly supernatural in the Western theological sense. They were ambiguous presences — sometimes mischievous, sometimes dangerous, sometimes explanatory, sometimes inexplicable. They blurred distinctions between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, material and immaterial. It was this elasticity that resonated with me most deeply.

Monstrous Dreams grew from sustained engagement with this instability. The project did not begin as an academic exercise. I had been creating monsters long before consciously engaging with Japanese traditions. Over decades of immersion in Japanese culture, visual language, and aesthetic systems, my work began to converge with yōkai — not as subjects to be copied, but as conceptual frameworks through which transformation itself could be explored.

There is no singular "original" yōkai form to which I could return. What exists instead is a lineage of reinterpretation — from Edo-period illustrated compendia to contemporary manga. By entering into this lineage, I participate in its historical logic. My paintings are neither traditional Japanese works nor Western appropriations of exotic subject matter. They are hybrid translations shaped by lived experience.