In Japanese culture, oni are ubiquitous supernatural creatures who play important roles in literature, lore, and folk belief. Characteristically ambiguous, they have been great and small, mischievous and dangerous, and ugly and beautiful over their long history. Here, author Noriko Reider presents seven oni stories from medieval Japan in full and translated for an English-speaking audience.
Reider, concordant with many scholars of Japanese cultural studies, argues that to studyoniis to study humanity. These tales are from an era in which many new oni stories appeared for the...