For the past few days, I’ve been reading Onmyoji on a mobile reading app. I used to insist on reading only physical books. My reasoning was simple: I had already given up writing by hand, so I didn’t want to give up paper reading too. A printed book gives reading a kind of ritual. It feels self-contained and clean, with fewer distractions.

But after spending some time with digital reading, I had to admit it has pleasures of its own. Leaving aside all the unnecessary extra functions, the reading experience itself can be surprisingly friendly. The catalog is large, and features like highlights, bookmarks, shelving, paragraph comments, chapter comments, and review notes make annotation much more efficient than with paper. And of course, there is portability.

I started Onmyoji after watching the anime adaptation. It became the first book I seriously read on the app, and I ended up reading it with unusual care—partly because the stories are good, and partly because I was learning the app’s tools as I went, gradually getting used to taking notes while reading.

I’m currently on Volume 1 of the series. Each chapter is essentially a complete, self-contained tale. Baku Yumemakura has long been regarded as a major figure in Japanese fantasy, and it’s easy to see why here: every story has its own center of gravity, whether in atmosphere, folklore, or cultural implication. I kept finishing chapters and then sitting with them for a while—sometimes reflecting, sometimes feeling unsettled, sometimes looking up background on Japanese customs and history. What follows are my impressions of several stories from this first volume.

The Toad

The fourth story, “The Toad,” begins with strange happenings at Suzakumon, the great gate of Heian-kyo. Minamoto no Hiromasa turns to Abe no Seimei for help. Their investigation uncovers a buried jar containing human ashes and an enormous toad. The creature has human eyes: it has been formed by the mingling of human essence and the toad’s own spirit. The source is a curse, with the toad acting as its medium. Seimei subdues the creature, empties out the ashes, and breaks the spell. Along the way, the two also pass through the eerie spectacle of a night parade of demons.

This little story left me with four immediate thoughts.

1. Japanese ghost lore puts monsters everywhere. Best not to provoke a toad—especially one so large it looks halfway to becoming a spirit.
2. Punishments faced by ordinary people in premodern Japan could be extremely harsh.
3. Rumor is terrifying. Once fear starts circulating, it becomes its own kind of reality. What is worse is when rulers elevate talk of spirits and omens above legal judgment, stop distinguishing right from wrong, and casually impose severe punishment on common people.
4. In old Japan, belief in the supernatural ran deep enough that ordinary people often tried to conduct their own rituals, whether to communicate with unseen forces or to take revenge.

The Ghost Woman’s Carriage

The fifth story, “A Tale of a Ghost’s Love,” centers on a bullock cart that appears late at night in Heian-kyo, pulled by two demons and making its way toward the imperial palace. People die because of it. Hiromasa again seeks Seimei’s help, and they discover that the carriage is driven by the female ghost Rindo. Fifteen years earlier, before he ascended the throne, the future emperor spent a night with her and promised they would meet again. He never returned. She pined away, died in bitterness, and came back as a vengeful spirit. Seimei borrows a lock of the emperor’s hair as a token, conveys repentance to her, and finally dissolves her resentment. The ghostly cart vanishes, and the disturbance ends.

This chapter also pushes toward a broader truth about Japanese myth and court culture: sexual transgression is hardly rare in the tradition. Then again, that is not unique to Japan; Greek mythology and many others are full of similar material. In Japanese myth, high deities often behave in ways that violate later moral standards, and many stories foreground unrestrained desire.

Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, become the primal pair whose union gives birth to the gods and the islands of Japan. Blood relation is not incidental there—it is built into the act of creation itself. After Izanami dies from giving birth to the fire god, Izanagi pursues her into the land of the dead, and even after seeing her decayed form, still longs to embrace her. The force of desire is not hidden. Susanoo, too, rampages without restraint, storms Amaterasu’s sacred space, disrupts ritual order, and behaves with a kind of wild instinct that reflects an older world before later ethical refinement.

If the gods can be like this, it is hardly surprising that Japanese imperial history contains many records of rulers and princes crossing ordinary moral boundaries. The Heian period is especially rich in such examples. A son of Emperor Uda, Prince Atsuhito, was known for slipping out in disguise and meeting common women, earning a reputation as a pleasure-seeking prince. Emperor Kazan became so attached to a favored consort that he eventually abdicated and became a monk. In later eras too, stories abound of emperors, princes, consorts, ladies-in-waiting, and court women entangled in desire beyond official rules. The roots of this are not mysterious: imperial privilege placed the court above ordinary social regulation, and polygynous structures created ample room for indulgence.

The White Bikuni

The sixth story, “White Bikuni,” begins with Seimei inviting Hiromasa to come armed. A white-robed nun arrives seeking help. Three hundred years earlier, she accidentally ate mermaid flesh and became ageless. Every thirty years, a calamity-serpent grows inside her body. In the past, Seimei’s teacher Kamo no Tadayuki removed it, but now that he is gone, she has no one else to turn to. After she disrobes, Seimei chants an incantation and drives a long needle into the back of her neck to lure out the serpent; Hiromasa cuts it down with his sword. Her slide into monstrosity is halted, and another danger to the capital is removed.

The White Bikuni—also known as Happaku Bikuni or Yao Bikuni—is one of Japan’s classic folklore figures. The core of the legend is simple: a woman accidentally eats mermaid flesh and gains an impossibly long life, often said to be eight hundred years. Obama in Fukui Prefecture is one of the main places where the tradition survives. One common version tells of a local elder receiving mermaid meat from a strange visitor linked to the Dragon Palace; he does not eat it, but his daughter does by mistake. Her beauty and youth freeze in place. As family and husbands die around her over the generations, she comes to understand the sorrow of impermanence, becomes a nun, and wanders the land helping people, healing illness, and aiding the poor. The name is associated both with white hair and with long life, and records of the legend go back at least to the fifteenth century. In the end, she returns home and dies in meditation, though alternate versions say signs in nature foretold her passing. The power of the story lies in the loneliness of immortality.

What is striking in Onmyoji is that Yumemakura takes this familiar figure in a different direction. Instead of becoming a wandering healer, his White Bikuni falls into prostitution after gaining immortality. She survives by selling her body to men—and not even to the rich or powerful, but often to men of no rank and no money, sometimes for almost nothing, sometimes for the price of a fish, sometimes for free.

That raises an uncomfortable question: why does someone who has escaped death end up reduced to a sexual object? Is it poverty? Is it temperament? Is it the author deliberately choosing the most provocative version possible? There is no clear answer. But one fact is obvious enough: bestselling Japanese fiction has never been shy about speaking openly about sex. In that respect, this chapter feels entirely at home in a culture already famous for sexual frankness in some of its popular art.

The Troublesome Little Demon

The seventh story, “The Little Demon Is Hard to Handle,” concerns a noble official, Shikibu no Taifu Sugawara no Fumitoki, who asks Hiromasa for help. On Kamo Mountain Lane, a strange child blocks the road. If anyone resists it, the child grows huge and injures them. Fumitoki is especially troubled because he keeps encountering it while sneaking out for romantic meetings. Hiromasa brings Seimei. They meet the child, who torments them repeatedly and at one point reveals a ghastly form with blue flames and fangs. Seimei ultimately breaks its defiant nature through words, and the “child” reveals itself to be an old carved wooden demon figure from the Sugawara household that has gained a spirit. Seimei seals it, and the road is quiet again.

This chapter led me to think less about the plot itself than about the larger religious world behind it. Japanese Buddhism absorbed an enormous amount from China. From the introduction of Buddhism from Baekje in the sixth century, through Prince Shotoku’s sponsorship and the Asuka foundations, into the Nara period’s Six Schools, Buddhism became deeply tied to state order. In the Heian period, Saicho brought back Tendai teachings from Tang China, while Kukai transmitted esoteric Buddhism and founded Shingon. By the Kamakura period, Buddhism moved closer to warriors and commoners through lineages such as Rinzai, Soto, and Nichiren. In the Edo period it became linked with population registration through the danka system. The Meiji anti-Buddhist backlash weakened it, but it recovered and remained embedded in Japanese life.

The point is that Japan did not merely borrow continental culture mechanically. It studied it carefully, transformed it over centuries, and turned it into something distinctly Japanese. That deserves recognition, and Buddhist culture is one of the clearest examples.

The Ordinary Master

The eighth story, “The Ordinary Master,” is built on a classic warning: obey instructions exactly. Seimei prepares to leave home and entrusts his teacher’s short sword, Hogetsu, to Hiromasa. He orders him to guard the house and admit absolutely no one. Hiromasa follows this command strictly—until a creature appears disguised as Seimei and tricks him into opening the door. Chaos erupts inside the house. At the critical moment, the real Seimei returns, sees through the impostor, and captures the shapeshifting “ordinary master” with his arts.

The final boss here is a tanuki, or more specifically a raccoon dog. In zoological terms, it is the only species in its genus, a canid native to East Asia, short-bodied and omnivorous, active mostly at night, and unusual among canids for winter dormancy. China knew the animal long ago; it appears in early literature as well.

But in Japanese supernatural culture, the tanuki is more than an animal. Alongside the fox and the serpent, it became one of the great trickster beings. The bake-danuki is famous for transformation and practical jokes. It appears in illustrated demon scrolls and in ghostly tales recorded by later writers. Regional legends multiply its forms: the tanuki of Sado who could conjure grand mansions by illusion; the tanuki of Hyogo skilled at transforming leaves into other things; and the bizarre shirime, the “rear-end eye” creature, a faceless apparition that startles passersby by revealing an eye where one absolutely should not be.

That detail is so absurd it becomes memorable. In some Edo ghost lore, this grotesque, backside-focused form is treated as a special manifestation of the tanuki. In a country whose folklore often delights in the perverse and ridiculous, even animal legends can become warped in a way that is both creepy and comic.

There is also a dark joke in this story involving Kansui-o, the old man who wants to learn sorcery from monsters and ends up literally “expelling a beast” from his rear. It is pathetic, ridiculous, and oddly reminiscent of the sort of person who loves the idea of dragons until one actually appears. The humor here is blunt, but unmistakable.

The Dharani Sage

The ninth story, “The Dharani Sage,” tells of the monk Jokan on Mount Hiei, whose chanting once brought down a celestial being named Yosho. That being stayed too long in the human world and eventually departed by riding the smoke of incense upward. Years later, Hiromasa hears strange sounds in the mountains and goes there with Seimei. They encounter an old monk who is in fact Yosho transformed. Because he grew attached to earthly beauty—flowers, birds, paintings—his soul can no longer return cleanly to his original body. Seimei helps him fulfill his remaining wish, the old monk’s spirit disperses, and the two men deal with the abandoned corpse in accordance with his instructions.

What I noticed again here, as in several other stories, is the repeated appearance of the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. This is one of the central images in Japanese ghost culture: a procession of yōkai roaming the night in groups. Its early form took shape between the Nara and Heian periods, under the influence of yin-yang thought, Buddhist ideas of rebirth, and indigenous beliefs in vengeful spirits. It became a way of giving form to fear of the unknown, to resentment, and to uncanny natural phenomena.

The parade is often associated with festival nights, rain-soaked darkness, or desolate streets. Its participants can include all manner of supernatural beings: the spirits of the wronged dead, mountain and river entities, and old objects transformed into tsukumogami after long use. Famous leaders in later imagination include Shuten-doji, great tengu, and the slippery old nurikabe and nurarihyon types of demon lore. To encounter such a procession as an ordinary person is dangerous; one can be haunted, harmed, even killed. By the Kamakura and Edo periods, picture scrolls, woodblock prints, and popular storytelling had fixed the image in cultural memory. It ceased to be only frightening and also became a symbolic way of expressing disorder and injustice in the human world.

At its heart, though, “The Dharani Sage” is about desire. Human beings are not meant to be empty of feeling. When Hiromasa laments life and death, Seimei remarks, in effect, that he has finally become a little more like an ordinary person. That line goes to the center of the story.

And yet the details remain distinctly strange. After finishing his sutra recitation, Jokan gazes at a painting of a beautiful woman and pleasures himself; the celestial visitor overhears, glimpses the painting, and is moved by desire as well. So yes, the story advocates honesty about human feeling—but it does so in a way that still leaves one thinking: are Japanese monks really this lustful in literature?

Night Dew

The tenth story, “Night Dew,” opens with Seimei and Hiromasa drinking together. Hiromasa tells him of Fujiwara no Kaneie’s supposed encounter with a night parade of demons and a bizarre tale in which an ox was devoured by spirits. He also recounts a story told by Lady Choshi: a man fleeing with a woman sees her notice glowing lights in the grass and ask, “What is that?” Before dawn she dies, and the man later answers, “It was night dew,” composing a waka around the event. Seimei concludes that Kaneie’s ghostly affair was staged by Kaneie himself, while the “night dew” story conceals a more ordinary tragedy: the woman had been taken back by her brother, and the man invented a poetic tale to dress up his heartbreak. Human attachment, like dew at night, vanishes quickly.

Strip away the supernatural packaging and this chapter is basically about officials chasing women. And why wouldn’t it be? If emperors are promiscuous and monks are lustful, of course bureaucrats are hardly going to be moral exceptions. Records and anecdotes alike preserve plenty of evidence that sexual intrigue was woven into elite male life in premodern Japan, often tied to politics, status, and social display.

In the Heian period, the Fujiwara regents stood at the center of power. Men such as Fujiwara no Michinaga are remembered not only for political control but also for intimate entanglements with court women and daughters of aristocratic houses, where romance could reinforce political alliance. Other aristocrats similarly gained reputations through exchanges of poetry and flirtation. By the Edo period, officialdom and urban pleasure culture overlapped freely; stories circulated of magistrates and high retainers mingling with courtesans and geisha, while visits to licensed quarters became ordinary habits among samurai administrators. Earlier still, in the age of warlords, political power and sexual entitlement often went hand in hand.

There is something here that recalls Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio: using ghosts and uncanny stories to satirize officials. The question is whether this particular story is truly satirical, or whether it is half-admiring the same world it depicts. I’m not sure the text condemns these men strongly enough to make the answer obvious.

Demon Komachi

The eleventh story, “Demon Komachi,” is the most poignant of the group. The lesser captain of Fukakusa waits sixty years to see Ono no Komachi, until his longing hardens into a ghostly obsession. Komachi herself, one of the famed Six Poetic Geniuses, had been too attached to beauty and applause during life and cannot become a Buddha in death. Her obsession fuses with his, and the two become a kind of double-souled lonely ghost. In a ruined temple they exchange poems in voices full of grief. Seimei and Hiromasa hear the songs and go to witness them. Komachi dances beneath swirling cherry blossoms, but the blossoms cannot conceal her wasted form. Seimei explains the nature of their attachment, yet admits he cannot save them. Some obsessions can only be released by those who bear them. Eventually the two spirits dissolve back into the night, leaving behind only the lingering resonance of their voices.

This chapter leaves little room for irony. Across time, across life and death, love and longing still cut to the bone. Even a great onmyoji cannot reach into another person’s heart and alter what is rooted there. That is why Seimei’s helplessness matters so much here. There are things no sorcery can undo.

And perhaps that is part of why these stories stay with me. Beneath the demons, spells, curses, shape-shifters, and night processions, they are really stories about human fear, resentment, lust, loneliness, pride, regret, and attachment. The supernatural gives those emotions form, but the emotions themselves are ordinary enough. That may be the most unsettling part of Onmyoji: its monsters are strange, but the hearts that create them are not.