Hyakki Yagyō

On certain nights, the monsters come down the street.

Not one of them. All of them — a procession, filling the road, moving through the capital in the dark: demons, animals, things with too many limbs, and a great crowd of household objects that have grown faces and legs and are marching along with the rest.

That's the Hyakki Yagyō, the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. It's about a thousand years old as an idea, and there has never been a single agreed version of what it means.

The oldest surviving encounter

From the great twelfth-century tale collection, set in the ninth:

A minister's son is out at night and meets a hundred demons coming from the direction of the main street. There is no escape and no hiding place.

He survives — and the reason he survives is my favourite detail in the whole tradition.

His nurse had sewn a protective sutra into his clothing. Years earlier, without telling him. He is wearing a charm he doesn't know about, put there by the woman who raised him, and when the demons reach him they recoil from it and flee.

The oldest lesson of the night parade is that grandmothers save courtiers.

It had a published timetable

Here's what makes the Japanese version of this idea unlike anyone else's apocalypse-procession.

A medieval encyclopedia, the Shūgaishō, codifies it. The parade walks on specific nights, identified by the zodiac calendar. If you know the date, you know whether tonight is one.

And the instructions are correspondingly practical: stay indoors on those nights, or recite the designated incantation. Professional diviners — the onmyōji of the imperial bureau — wrote exorcism scrolls that protected a house.

So the night parade is a monster event with a schedule, a set of licensed countermeasures, and a professional class you could pay to handle it.

That is the bureaucratization of dread, and it is very Heian. The court had a government department for divination; of course the demon procession had a calendar.

Two different parades share the name

Worth knowing, because it explains a confusion you'll meet everywhere.

The literary night parade — the one in the old tale collections — is lethal. Demons that kill courtiers who get in their way, avoided by staying home and wearing the right charm.

The painted night parade, from the Muromachi scrolls onward, is something else entirely: a carnival of discarded household objects. Old umbrellas, abandoned lutes, worn-out sandals, cast-off cooking pots — the things people threw away, processing through the night with faces on, having a considerably better time than anyone watching them.

Those are different institutions sharing a name. One is a warning about the dark. The other is a joke about the rubbish heap, and it's the one that became the picture everybody knows.

And the catalogs are printed parades

The last thing, which is really the frame for everything else here.

Toriyama Sekien's books — the great illustrated monster catalogs that supply so much of this material — say it in their own titles. Gazu Hyakki Yagyō: "The Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons."

They are the parade, printed. A procession you can hold, that walks past at the speed you turn the pages.

Which makes any collection like this one a night parade too — the marchers laid out in order, dusk as the opening hour, and something waiting at the end of the hundredth.

And the Konjaku story remains the emblem for all of it. What got that young man home was a piece of writing, carefully prepared in advance by somebody who cared about him, sewn into the thing he was wearing.

Documentation as the charm in the garment.