Grim Fairy Tales

I saw that picture years ago in an encyclopedia of mythology and was always captivated by the figure at the right in the background, the Earth Spider. He's about as nasty as an eight-foot-high Japanese spider demon can be. There he is, weaving his web of nightmares over the epic hero Kuniyoshi.

Last Thursday I went to the Ashmolean for an exhibition of 19th-century Japanese prints illustrating stories of ghosts and demons, and this picture was one of them. I also rather liked the haunted hero who looks out from his tea room to see a landscape transformed into skulls - a skull hill, trees bedecked with skulls, skulls on the grass, even th lanterns. Yes, that's what being nuts is like. The world of Japanese folklore with all its categories of very unpleasant supernatural being is beguiling. One trick I thought the display missed was any relationship to modern manifestations of Eastern ghosts and ghouls - the horrid Sadako prime among them, of course.