Many Japanese anime and manga narratives draw on Japanese folklore, reimagining tales for a modern audience, and contain references to or examples of supernatural creatures, or yokai. (1) As in Western culture, yokai, which can be translated as monsters, spirits, or demons, are a rich source of material for contemporary pop culture narratives, especially for stories in science fiction, fantasy, action, and adventure genres. Many websites and books for non-Japanese fans list the references to folktales and yokai in popular manga and anime, to help make them accessible to foreign audiences. But how else can we talk about them besides simply explaining the references to traditional culture? What is the deeper connection between yokai and anime or between modes of anime and yokai discourse?

Popular discourse on both anime and yokai seems to have an affinity for the creation of databases, or vast compendiums of knowledge, wherein each data point is equally important. In this article I explore the tendency toward the creation of databases in both yokai and anime and show how the database makes yokai available for modern narratives and encourages interaction with those narratives by fans. My primary examples will be Gegege no Kitaro and Inuyasha, two of the most popular manga and anime series to draw extensively on folklore. The database is one way to talk about both anime and yokai more productively and to expand the ways we talk about how texts are produced and consumed.

The Database and the Encyclopedic Mode

In his book Dobutsuka suru posutomodaan (The Animalizing Postmodern, translated into English as Otaku: Japan's Database Animals), Azuma Hiroki claims that otaku, or obsessive fans of anime and manga, are no longer interested in the grand narrative of their favorite fictions but focus instead on organizing details of the characters and fictional world into a database. As his example, he looks at the TV anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), in which the greatest impact, Azuma argues, was not the complex fictional world of giant robots, alien invasion, or Kabbalah-inspired mysticism but the character Ayanami Rei, whom the obsessive fans or otaku found attractive. Her appearance and personality were broken down into discrete units of moe (affective) elements and copied in the designs of many other characters used in other manga, anime, video games, figurines, and so on. Azuma claims that this is not merely a matter of imitation but a database model of consumption; every time a popular character like Rei emerges, aspects of that character are recombined to create new characters (51-52). He relates this to the dating simulation video games also favored by otaku, in which players can construct girlfriends based on desired moe elements. Azuma writes, "The surface outer layer of otaku culture is covered with simulacra, or derivative works. But in the deep inner layer lies the database of settings and characters, and further down, the database of moe elements" (58). This is part of Azuma's larger argument, which is that otaku are the forerunners of a new...