YOKAI. The Ancient Prints of Japanese Monsters

On the blood of forty thousand severed enemy heads was founded the long Pax Tokugawa. The year 1600 marked the end of the period of wars that saw the defeat of the troops opposing General Ieyasu Tokugawa. The absence of wars, banishing the memories and horrors of past massacres, favoured the development of epic tales that gave life to dark and terrifying atmospheres, such as the game of the hundred candles, a test of courage in which a handful of warriors meet on a summer night to tell each other scary stories populated by monsters belonging to the national tradition. Thus the Jorogumo, comely women who reveal to their victims their real nature as enormous spiders; the Tanuki, cute transforming badgers; the Bakeneko, monstrous cats; the Kappa, aquatic beings that pester the female inhabitants; the Ningyo, mermaids whose perfumed flesh can give men new youth or an atrocious death. The macabre ritual of the hundred candles is the great idea behind this original project that presents two hundred works from the 18th and 19th centuries, including prints, rare antique books, clothes, weapons, swords, a samurai armour, as well as seventy-seven precious netsuke, small ivory sculptures, from the Bertocchi private collection and a ten-metre long scroll that tells the story of Shutendoji, a mythological creature (Oni) at the head of an army of monsters that infested Mount Oe near Kyoto.