about me

An oni is a demon or ogre from Japanese folklore — usually big, usually horned, often red or blue-skinned, traditionally carrying an iron club called a kanabō and wearing a tiger-skin loincloth. That specific combination is not random. The northeast was considered the unlucky direction, the kimon or demon gate, and in the old zodiac compass the northeast sits between the ox and the tiger. So the oni got the ox's horns and the tiger's pelt. The look is a diagram of a superstition.

No, and the translation causes endless confusion. A devil in the Christian sense is a moral opposite — evil defined against good. An oni is closer to a force: dangerous, sometimes cruel, sometimes stupid, occasionally protective, and frequently a person who became one through rage or grief rather than a being created wicked. There are oni that guard temple gates and oni faces on roof tiles specifically to scare off worse things. Calling one a devil throws all of that away.

Yokai is a catch-all for supernatural things in Japanese folklore — spirits, monsters, strange phenomena, and a lot of entries that are really just an unexplained noise with a name attached. It covers everything from a genuinely frightening mountain spirit to a haunted paper lantern to the specific feeling of a wall appearing in front of you on a dark road. The breadth is the point. It is a vocabulary for the uncanny rather than a bestiary of monsters.

A yurei is specifically the ghost of a dead person, and it is a subcategory rather than a separate thing. The classical image is very fixed: white burial clothes, long loose black hair, hands hanging limp from the wrists, and often no visible feet, which is a convention that spread through Edo-period painting. A yokai can be anything at all. A yurei has unfinished business, and in the stories the business is almost always something a living person did to them.

The hannya is a Noh theatre mask representing a woman transformed by jealousy and grief into a demon. It gets used as a generic angry-demon graphic, which flattens the entire thing. Carved properly it is designed to change with the angle: tilt it down and the face reads as sorrowful, tilt it up and it reads as enraged. The mask is a woman in two emotional states at once. That is why it is a masterpiece and not just a scary face.

The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons — a procession of yokai through the streets after dark, which anyone unlucky enough to witness was not supposed to survive. It appears in medieval picture scrolls as a long, chaotic parade of animated objects and grinning creatures, and it was later turned into something like an illustrated encyclopaedia by the artist Toriyama Sekien in the late eighteenth century. A huge amount of what people now think of as classic yokai design traces back to those prints.

The slit-mouthed woman. She wears a mask, asks whether you think she is pretty, removes the mask to show a mouth cut ear to ear, and asks again. There is no good answer. What makes her interesting is that she is genuinely modern — she spread as a rumour among Japanese schoolchildren around 1979, seriously enough that it made the news and affected how kids walked home. She is a real-time record of how a folk story forms, which almost never gets captured.

Most of them, yes. A few are bought pieces I have repainted, and I say which when it comes up, because pretending otherwise would be insulting to whoever carved them. The ones I make start as a clay sculpt over a cast of my own face, get moulded in silicone, and come out in resin or latex depending on whether they need to flex. It is slow, dusty, unglamorous work and I love it.

Between two weeks and never. The sculpt is a few days if it is going well. The mould is a day plus curing. The pull is quick. Then paint, which is where the time actually goes, because a mask that looks good in your hands often looks like plastic on camera and you have to go back and rebuild the depth. My honest average is about three weeks per finished piece, and roughly a third of them never get finished at all.

Acrylic, almost always, sealed in layers rather than all at once. The trick that made everything click for me was to stop painting colour and start painting shadow: a wash into every recess, wiped back off the high points, repeated at lower and lower opacity until the depth is doing the work. Colour goes on last and thin. Matte varnish over the whole thing, then selective gloss only where something should look wet.

Corn syrup as the base, a red that is browner and duller than instinct says, and cocoa powder to kill the pink. Real blood is dark and slightly muddy; bright red reads as paint on camera every single time. A drop of dish soap makes it wash out of fabric, and a splash of water thins it for running versus keeping it thick for pooling. Make it fresh, because it goes strange after a couple of days and it attracts everything.

They are uncomfortable, they get worse the longer they are in, and they are only safe if you treat them properly. Get them from somewhere that requires a prescription, never share them with anyone for any reason, never sleep in them, keep the wear time short and actually set a timer rather than trusting yourself. If an eye goes red or sore, take them out immediately and do not put them back in. Your eyes are not a renewable resource.

Underexposure is not atmosphere, it is just a bad photo. What creates dread is contrast and direction — one hard source, low and to the side, with the shadow falling somewhere it does not belong. Then a very faint second source behind the subject to separate them from the background so they do not sink into a black hole. If a shape is unreadable, the viewer stops looking. You want them able to see it and wishing they could not.

Buy less than you think and use it more. One good palette, one bottle of decent adhesive, some tissue and a sealer will get you further than a two-hundred-piece kit. Learn to build texture out of something cheap before you touch silicone. And film everything as you go, because a piece that looks incredible in the mirror can be completely illegible through a lens, and finding that out early saves you a year.

Kwaidan, from 1964. It is four ghost stories, it is enormously beautiful, and it establishes the entire grammar that everything after it is speaking. If two and a half hours of stately colour is too much of an ask, start with Kairo instead, which is about loneliness and the internet and is quietly the most upsetting film on my shelf. Ringu is fine. It is just not the beginning of anything.

That is the export version. The long-haired ghost is one very successful image from one very successful decade, and it flattened everything else in the popular memory. The tradition it came from is mostly slow, moral and sad — stories about obligation, guilt and things that were owed and never paid. Watch Onibaba or Ugetsu and count the jumpscares. You will not need both hands, and you will not sleep well either.

Junji Ito is the obvious answer and he deserves it — Uzumaki is a genuinely perfect piece of escalating nonsense. But the one I push harder is anything by Shigeru Mizuki, who spent a lifetime cataloguing yokai and drawing them with real affection, and whose war memoirs are more frightening than any of his monsters. Kazuo Umezu's The Drifting Classroom if you want to be actively distressed for several hundred pages.

Fatal Frame, without hesitation, because fighting ghosts with a camera means the mechanic forces you to look directly at the thing you want to avoid, which is a stroke of design genius. Siren is punishing and brilliant. Kuon is obscure, Noh-inflected and almost nobody played it. And Silent Hill 2 is not Japanese folklore at all but it is the best written horror game ever made, so I am including it anyway.

Films, rarely. Folklore, sometimes, and never the loud parts. The stories that get me are the quiet procedural ones — the ones where a person does something small and slightly wrong, nothing happens, and then something happens much later. That gap is the scariest device anyone has invented, and it works on me every time even though I can see it coming from the first page.

Oni is the demon. Suna is sand. Put together it does not mean anything in particular in Japanese and I would rather be honest about that than invent a poetic translation for it. I liked the sound and I liked that the first half told people immediately what they were getting. Plenty of people read it as one word, plenty write it as oni suna, and both find me.

It is mine. This is where I keep every link I actually use, and the only reliable way to check any account claiming to be me is to compare it against what is on this page. If something is not linked from here, I did not make it. That is the whole verification process and it works in the other direction too — reach this site from a profile you already trust rather than from a link somebody sent you.

No. Nothing of mine has been leaked, because nothing was taken — what circulates is content I published myself, copied, recompressed and resold by people who did not make it. It is old, it looks terrible, and a fair proportion of what is filed under my name is not even me. There is a whole page on this site about how those operations work and how to spot a fake account, and it is worth five minutes of your time.

I am not going to build a fake biography, so: this is a folklore interest, seriously held and seriously researched, not a claim of heritage. I read what I can, I lean heavily on translators and on people who know far more than I do, and when I get something wrong I would genuinely rather be corrected than left alone about it. The ask box on this page is the fastest way to do that.

Both, honestly. The aesthetic does not get switched off — the masks, the light and the general atmosphere carry straight over, and a lot of what I post there is the fuller version of things that only get a few seconds elsewhere. It is not a horror film with a plot. It is the same person in the same room with the same set of obsessions and considerably fewer restrictions.

You pay a monthly amount for access to a page, exactly like any other subscription, and it renews until you turn the renewal off. It bills through the platform rather than through me — I never see your card, and I never see your legal name. There is a message function, which is where most of the conversation happens. You can cancel at any time and you keep access until the period you already paid for runs out.

The descriptor is a neutral company name rather than the platform or my handle, which is deliberate and is the same for everybody. It is not invisible — somebody determined and looking directly at your statement can search a string and find out what it is — so treat it as discreet rather than secret. If total privacy matters to you, a prepaid card is the answer people usually land on.

I reply. Not instantly and not to everything, because there are only so many hours, but the messages are read by me and answered by me. If you get something that reads like a form letter you have almost certainly found an impersonator rather than a real conversation, and that is worth checking before you send anything else or, especially, before you send anyone money.

Almost certainly not. I do not sell through Telegram, Discord, Snapchat or a reseller, I never move a conversation off-platform for a better deal, and I will never ask for a gift card, a crypto transfer or a direct bank payment. Every one of those is a scam without exception. Check the handle character by character against the links here and you will usually see it immediately.

Yes, and I would rather you asked than assumed the answer is no. Some of it I will do, some of it does not fit what I make, and some of it is a hard no that will stay a hard no. Nobody has ever been made to feel strange for asking politely, and I will always tell you plainly which of the three it is rather than leaving you guessing.

Completely fine about it. It is how a huge number of people arrive, it costs nothing to be normal about it, and I would much rather someone typed that into a search bar, landed here and got a straight answer than went three sites deep into somewhere that wants their card details. You are not in trouble. Have a look around while you are here.

It works out which yokai you are, it is completely unscientific, and it collects nothing whatsoever. The scoring runs entirely in your browser and no answer is ever sent anywhere — the only thing recorded is a count of how many people reached a result at all, with no indication of which one. It takes about a minute and the results are meaner than you are expecting.