{"id":5148,"date":"2004-03-13T16:44:57","date_gmt":"2004-03-14T00:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/13\/5148\/"},"modified":"2004-03-13T16:44:57","modified_gmt":"2004-03-14T00:44:57","slug":"425-monsters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/?p=5148","title":{"rendered":"425 Monsters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At one point I was looking for (and finally found) a book of woodblock prints of Japanese monsters.<\/p>\n<p \/>\nI have since gotten a great book that my friend Sandy brought from Japan:  it&#8217;s called<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.jp\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/4062560496\">(\u00e5\u203a\u00b3\u00e8\u00aa\u00ac)\u00e6\u2014\u00a5\u00e6\u0153\u00ac\u00e5\u00a6\u2013\u00e5\u00bf\u00ab\u00e5\u00a4\u00a7\u00e5\u2026\u00a8<\/a> \u00ef\u00bc\u02c6which MAY be read &#8220;<i>[zusetsu] nippon youkai taizen<\/i>&#8221; ??)  which translates to <i>(Illustrated) encyclopedia of japanese bewitching monsters<\/i> I think.  The book is by  Shigeru Mizuki ( \u00e6\u00b0\u00b4\u00e6\u0153\u00a8\u00e3\u20ac\u20ac\u00e3\u0081\u2014\u00e3\u0081\u2019\u00e3\u201a\u2039).<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<p>The problem is I have no idea how to say the title, since there aren&#8217;t any <i>furigana<\/i> and my vocabulary isn&#8217;t very extensive, and my dictionaries don&#8217;t have any of these words in them.  I had to piece it together by looking up the <i>kanji<\/i>, then finding all the readings for each, then looking up those phrases I built in my dictionary.  Agh!<\/p>\n<p \/>\nSearching for information, it&#8217;s the \u00e5\u00a6\u2013\u00e5\u00bf\u00ab part which is giving me problems.   It seems to be associated with a lot of anime porn&#8230; maybe it means &#8220;fantastical&#8221; ?<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<p>  Okay I did a little research on the author- he is pretty famous, having done:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i>Gegege no Kitaro<\/i> &#8211; they made a Nintendo game out of this one, and a TV show.  If you see a Japanese action figure of a boy with long hair combed over one eye, or a eyeball with legs (yes they are related!) then you have seen paraphernalia from this series.<\/li>\n<li><i>Akuma-kun<\/i><\/li>\n<li><i>Kappa no sanpei youkai daisakusen<\/i> &#8211; I&#8217;ve never seen this one, but it has a <i>kappa<\/i> in it, so it must be good!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>According to a post by &#8220;August Ragone&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Shigeru Mizuki who lost his right arm in the Pacific War, and trained himself to draw with his left. He came to national attention in Japan in the mid-1960s with his striking and unusual style, and several of his manga were transformed into television seriess.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There seems to be a distinction between <i>youkai<\/i>, which are more like weird creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, from <i>obake<\/i>, which are more &#8220;abomination&#8221; type monsters, like undead things.  I found an essay by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.k-i-a.or.jp\/ts-report\/\">Robert Jay Gould<\/a> which was pretty informative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At one point I was looking for (and finally found) a book of woodblock prints of Japanese monsters. I have since gotten a great book that my friend Sandy brought from Japan: it&#8217;s called (\u00e5\u203a\u00b3\u00e8\u00aa\u00ac)\u00e6\u2014\u00a5\u00e6\u0153\u00ac\u00e5\u00a6\u2013\u00e5\u00bf\u00ab\u00e5\u00a4\u00a7\u00e5\u2026\u00a8 \u00ef\u00bc\u02c6which MAY be read &#8220;[zusetsu] nippon youkai taizen&#8221; ??) which translates to (Illustrated) encyclopedia of japanese bewitching monsters I think. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}