Toriyama Sekien, the great eighteenth-century cataloguer of Japan's spirits, drew him once, and the image has never needed revising: out of the black mud of a rice paddy, under a broken moon, rises the upper half of a man — one-eyed, hairy, dripping, mouth open in a cry — with three fingers on each groping hand. He is the dorotabō : the "muddy rice-field old man," and unlike nearly every other creature in the crowded night-parade of Japanese folklore, everyone always knew exactly who he was, because he told them. Night after night, from the flooded field on the edge of the village, the voice comes up out of the mud, hoarse and grieving and unappeasable, crying the one sentence the dorotabō has ever been heard to say: "Ta wo kaese!" — "Give me back my field!"

The story is told in a hundred Japanese towns, each certain it happened at their own sweet-shop, and it begins with the smallest of mysteries: a late customer. Every night, just at closing, a young woman comes to the candy store — pale, quiet, her hair a little damp, holding one coin — and buys a single portion of ame , the soft malt sweets that infants can suck. She says almost nothing. She comes the next night, and the next, always one coin, always the same sweets, always the hour when the lanterns are being taken in. On the seventh night — in most tellings it is the seventh — she has no coin. She stands in the doorway with her sleeves together and asks, in a voice like paper, whether kindness might stretch to one more portion; and the shopkeeper, moved and unsettled in equal measure, gives it. Then he does what people in these stories must do: he follows her. Through the empty lanes, past the last houses, up the hill — to the temple graveyard, where she passes among the stones a...

Every culture that has kept cats has eventually asked itself the same quiet question at two in the morning: what, exactly, is this? The dog declared for humanity ten thousand years ago and has never wavered. The cat signed nothing. It lives at the hearth on terms it has declined to explain, watches doorways where nothing stands, and looks at its keepers, sometimes, with an attention that is not affection. Old Japan — a civilization of paper walls, fish-oil lamps, and long attentive nights — asked the question more carefully than anyone, and arrived at an answer of superb unsentimentality: the house cat is a probationary spirit . Treat it well and mind its years, and it remains a cat. But let it live too long, grow too large, or see too much — and it changes . The Japanese word says only that: bakeneko , the changed cat. And of all the monsters of the Japanese night, none begins closer to the pillow.

By daylight she is the most ordinary woman in the street — a merchant's wife, a teahouse servant, a quiet daughter of a respectable house. Her neighbors would swear to her character. She would swear to it herself, and she would not be lying, for she knows nothing. It is only at night, when she sleeps — or seems to — that the truth of her unwinds. Beside the guttering lamp her neck begins to lengthen: smoothly, bonelessly, like a cord paying out, until her head is drifting through the dark rooms at the end of a pale serpent of throat — sliding along the ceiling beams, dipping to the andon lamp to lap at the vegetable oil with a long tongue, peering with mild, sleepwalking curiosity into the faces of the household as they dream. Toward dawn the neck winds home, coil by coil. She wakes on her pillow, remembering nothing — or almost nothing: a strange dream, perhaps, of seeing the room from above; a taste of oil faintly in her mouth; and on her neck, when she dresses, fine pale line...

In the gorges of Japan there hangs, every autumn, a spider of unsettling beauty: the jorō spider, banded in gold and steel-blue, queen of a web that can span a mountain path. Japanese tradition looked at her long enough, and thought about her habits carefully enough, to arrive at a conclusion both logical and terrifying: a creature that weaves so well, waits so patiently, and wraps its lovers so fatally would, given time, learn to hunt bigger game. The jorōgumo — the name is written "entangling bride" or, less politely, "whore spider" — is what she becomes: a spider that, upon reaching four hundred years of age, gains magical power and the ability to take the form of a stunningly beautiful woman. In that form she keeps house in waterfalls, ruined temples, and empty mountain dwellings; she plays the lute to lure young men in from the road; she binds them in silk that no blade will cut; and she feeds on them at her leisure, patiently, as spiders feed. She is one ...

Yuki-onna — Toriyama Sekien, from the Gazu Hyakki Yakō ("The Illustrated Night Parade of One Hundred Demons"), 1776. Sekien's encyclopedic cataloguing of yōkai gave many Japanese supernatural beings their definitive visual form. His Yuki-onna is serene and beautiful, the cold expressed in the stillness of the figure rather than in any explicit threat — the danger is in the beauty, not in spite of it.