What this is
A bestiary of Japan's yokai — built on one promise: attribution claims, not truth claims. Folklore has no canonical version; there is no "correct" kappa. What can be true is who said what, where, when — and that is what every entry here records. Where a creature was invented in 1784 or 1966, we say so, and by whom; where it has walked since the eighth century, we show the receipts. Our thesis is borrowed from the scholarship and earned entry by entry (yōkai): worship is the variable; the being is the constant.
Why "Night Parade"
The hyakki yagyō — the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons — is the tradition's own image for all of its creatures moving together through the dark, on scheduled nights, with published countermeasures. This site is built as one: it opens at twilight, the entries march in their wings, and at the end of the hundred-tales mode, something waits by the last lamp.
The door, guarded
At this door stands an obscure figure from Sekien's 1784 catalog: Heiroku — a shivering spirit clutching a ritual wand, "in the capital of flowers, with no shrine fixed." A god with the implement and no address. He is the whole tradition in one picture, and he is welcome here.
The lineage, honestly
This site is the seventh runner in a relay (the writers): the diviner, the cataloguer, the transmitters, the debunker, the founders, the reviver — "every century, somebody wrote them down, and every writer added some of their own." We differ in one ambition: to be the first that labels its additions. Fittingly, the world's default versions of these tales were carried by collaborators history nearly forgot — Koizumi Setsu retelling for Hearn, Sasaki Kizen narrating for Yanagita. Their names are on our sources page.
The closing story
Why retell any of this? The tradition contains its own answer (Hōichi): the blind biwa-player summoned nightly to a graveyard by the drowned court of the Heike — not for vengeance. The dead wanted to hear their story told, and wept at their own defeat, beautifully sung. That is the entire business of folklore in one scene, and the business of this site: the parade doesn't ask to be believed. It asks to be told — accurately, generously, with the teller's additions labeled and the dead given their due.
Rashomon taught the world a word for contested versions (the gate itself is in here); this bestiary's method is simply to keep every version, sourced, side by side.
Enter at dusk. Mind the rules.