Bakemono no e
Bakemono no e, also known by its alternate title Bakemonozukushie, is a Japanese handscroll of the Edo period depicting 35 bakemono from Japanese folklore. The figures are hand-painted on paper in vivid pigments with accents in gold and silver pigments. Each bakemono is labeled with its name in hand-brushed ink. There is no other writing on the scroll, no colophon, and no artist's signature or seal.
Provenance
Bakemono no e is held by the L. Tom Perry Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, US and is part of the Harry F. Bruning Collection of Japanese rare books and manuscripts. Harry F. Bruning acquired the scroll from Charles E. Tuttle in 1952. The artwork is dated to c. 1660 as according to the description of the scroll in Tuttle's catalog 266, which would make it the arguably the oldest extant example of the bakemonozukushi, or monster index, genre. Most of the bakemono illustrated are also found in other scrolls and books of the Edo period, with a few exceptions.
Scholarly interest
The scroll came to the attention of Japanese scholars and the famous manga artist Shigeru Mizuki in 2007 when digital images of the scroll were shared with Kōichi Yumoto, then curator at the Kawasaki City Museum. Yumoto was surprised to find an image of a three-eyed bakemono clearly labeled "Nurikabe" in the BYU scroll that matched an unlabeled illustration of the same figure in a scroll Yumoto owns. The Nurikabe image later became the topic of scholarly debate in Japan.
Bakemono list
The following is a list of bakemono featured in Bakemono no e, along with their backgrounds.