30 Nights with the Oni: Japanese Oni Tales Retold (30 Nights with Japanese Folklore) by Makoto Press

In Japan, there is a direction you do not build toward. The northeast. The kimon. The oni-gate. They come through it — horned, red-skinned, carrying iron clubs too heavy for a human to lift. They raid villages and kidnap women from the capital. They sit in the Buddhist hells with iron tools, administering karmic law on shifts that never end. They watch a jealous wife's face harden in a mirror and climb out through her skin. They stand at the corners of temple roofs, their faces carved in clay, protecting the buildings from others like themselves. They wait at the door on the night between winter and spring — so close that the beans hit something, and the chant drives something, back into the dark. They are the oni — the horned, fanged creatures at the foundation of Japanese folklore, at once enforcer and outlaw, hell-warden and heartbroken friend, each version contradicting the others, none of them apologizing. Their stories are among the oldest, strangest, and most morally unstable in world literature. 30 Nights with the Oni brings thirty of these stories to life in polished, atmospheric, modern English prose. Each tale is drawn from the Japanese oni tradition — from the medieval Konjaku Monogatari-shū to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's hell stories to the Noh plays, Edo kabuki, and Meiji folk-tale anthologies of Ozaki, Davis, and Mitford — and retold for the contemporary reader who wants to be immersed, not lectured. Read more