The creator of one of the most famous paintings in the world, 19th century artist Katsushika Hokusai certainly left his mark not only on the art world but on world culture as a whole. As part of his series entitled Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, his famous print, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, depicts a great Prussian-blue wave tossing boats around in the frothing ocean, with Fuji visible in the background. Carved as a woodblock print back in 1831, when the master was in his seventies, this piece of artwork not only showed the mountain in all its glory, but has been analysed since as representing a threat from overseas from other nations, threatening to overwhelm the Japanese way of life and drown its spiritual monument, the mountain itself, which had long been a site of religious and spiritual reflection, and continues to be to this day.
The Great Wave may well be his masterpiece, reprinted possibly billions of times by now, but this wasn’t all the artist completed. Another of his series was entitled Hyaku Monogatari (One Hundred Ghost Stories), created in around 1830. Despite the name, it somehow only managed to get to five pieces, which is a shame, because they’re a wonderfully disturbing few images of spooky madness from nearly 200 years ago. Any horror fan worth their salt would do a lot worse than to spend some time admiring them.
The first of the five prints is entitled ‘The Mansion of the Plates’, and draws its inspiration from one of the same stories that inspired Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring, that of the story of the ten plates and the ghost of Okiku. A maid accidentally breaks one of a set of plates belonging to her master, who in a rage, kills her and throws her down a well. Later she returns from the well as a spirit to wreak her revenge. Versions of this story have Okiku as completely innocent, with both her master (or would-be suiter) hiding the plate and then blaming her, or his wife hiding the plate. In all of these cases, it doesn’t end well for poor Okiku. Interestingly enough, a species of bug discovered in the late 1700s was known as ‘Okiku Mushi’, or the Okiku bug, named after the maid who was killed.
Koji Suzuki would take the ‘bug’ into technological realms when Sadako becomes the ghostly-tech hybrid infection of the ‘Ring virus’ in Spiral and Loop, the second and third books in the Ring series respectively. In his painting over 150 years prior, Hokusai’s painting of the story is beautifully bizarre, with Okiku’s neck stretching from out of the broken well like a great worm, the plates forming her neck show her fusing with that which caused her misery all that time ago.
In The Laughing Hannya, one might recognise the kind of face which would become popular to oversees audiences through the mask in the 1960 film Onibaba. A horned demon laughing with blood around its face, the child’s head in its clawed hand, blood dripping from the crown, is immensely disturbing. What a beautiful job Hokusai had done with the woodblock, however, managing to carve in a way to so much detail into the hair, so many tiny strands, set apart from the relatively plain face of the demon-transformed woman (or ‘hannya’, hence the title), save for the speckling of blood on its maw. The skeletal hands really set it aside as something horrific and monstrous, cannibalistic and unholy.
Stories of spurned lovers continue to haunt horror films from Asia even now, and their imbuing themselves with physical items as a form of their manifestation gives them an additional sense of dread. Marley’s ghost might have been transfiguring door knockers over in England, but years before that there was a samurai’s wife thrown away after his new lover’s friends give her a face cream that poisons and disfigures her. Hokusai shows the spirit of Oiwa in the painting of the same name, possessing and disfiguring a paper lantern in a print of the same name, usually seen as a sign of good luck and happiness to guide spirits to the afterlife, to claim her revenge, twisting good into bad. Using the lantern’s sections to break apart the spirit’s face, like a snake unhinging its jaw, eyes red and raw, the whole image presents such an uncanny intrusion of the bizarre into the normal that it’s almost impossible not to be transfixed by its awfulness.
Back before a century ago, a swastika was seen as a sign of good luck and hopefulness in many cultures, including Buddhism. It is therefore fitting that an oroborous-like snake, symbol of eternity and never-ending emotion, surrounds it in the print Obsession, which also depicts a memorial tablet and offerings on a Buddhist altar. An emotion that could go beyond even the realms of death, that such a powerful feeling would be represented by a snake (seen as evil in many cultures, not just Christianity and the Indiana Jones films) gives the painting a worthwhile feeling of ugliness. It’s not a scene anyone would want to come across, and whilst perhaps not as visually striking as the others in the series, it’s much more symbolic and universal in its depiction of the ghostly retention of ideas after departure.
The final print in the series, Kohada Koheiji, touches upon a real-world incident. The eponymous man of the title, an actor believed to have lived in the later Edo period, is murdered by his wife her lover. Returning, mosquito-like, he rises in a mix of skeletal hands and insectoid fronds to peer over the mosquito net of his wife’s bed. The story had already been novelised and adapted into several kabuki theatre plays by the time Hokusai got around to his version, so he had to do something different to stand out. It’s therefore not surprising that this one is the most gruesome of the paintings, even beyond The Laughing Hannya, with Hokusai depicting a cracked skull, fleshless and leering jaws, and once again the pupils in the top of the sockets, looking up. Doing this with all his faces (aside from Hannya) gives the spirits not only a sense of uniformity, adding to their identity as part of a woodblock series, but makes them just that little more strange. We’re used to looking straight on at things, and spirits looking to the tops of their heads makes them seem a little more deathly, as if the eyes that rolled to the heavens upon their passing have been locked in place. The two tones of blue, lighter for the net and darker for the sky beyond, gives the print just a little extra surreal strangeness.
The sequence is a great little series of prints from back in the day, especially before photography. Although magic lanterns had been shown in Japan for a few decades, thanks to the introduction by the Dutch (the only country they annually traded with for over a century), woodblock prints were much more the norm for visual art, becoming more and more common for the average individual to possess works of art in their homes as time went on throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Bringing these prints to story telling groups, where candles would be extinguished one after another until, with the final one gone, a ghost would appear, would also help get one in the right mood for terror. In today’s world, they’re obviously much overlooked by Hokusai’s other artistic achievements, but they nonetheless remain a wonderful window into spooky, horrific media nearly two hundred years old.
HorrorAddicts.net Press Presents:
Horror Writer Contest winner, Jonathan Fortin.
Jonathan Fortin
Gothic stories, Jonathan was named the Next Great Horror Writer in 2017 by HorrorAddicts.net. He attended the Clarion Writing Program in 2012, one year after graduating summa cum laude from San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing program. When not writing, Jonathan enjoys voice acting, dressing like a Victorian gentleman, and indulging in all things odd and macabre in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Hello Addicts,
the International Edgar Allan Poe Society. He lives in Canada on Vancouver Island. 
anthologies Curse of the Gods (ed. Sarah Gribble), Once and Future Moon (ed. Allen Ashley), and Beneath Strange Stars (TL;DR Press). She often tweets and doodles when she should be writing. 
Edited by Emerian Rich
The refreshing script simplifies the Dickensian wordiness yet we do get some of the sardonic undigested beef quips amid self-aware glances at the camera and eternity spent in a forest of abandoned Christmas trees and forgotten childhood memories. An act of kindness said to be given to someone in pain is rejected as the abused perpetuate abuse, dealing in greed and people as commodities. Those scarred mentally and physically by the cruel, cost-cutting overseers rightfully call upon revenge like a reverse It’s A Wonderful Life orchestrating this spiritual comeuppance. Snowfall and ash in the air mix as other realms and childhood fears merge with violent canes, creepy singsongs, and pets caught in the chilling crossfire in a house that can’t afford another mouth to feed. Hiding behind the bed curtains is used to frightful effect as A Christmas Carol shows what the book implies yet leaves nasty suggestions to the shadows. Hope, however, can be found small as a mouse, big as a camel, or even in fanciful book illustrations come to life to save a boy’s mind from his torturous reality. Unfortunately, people are only worried about themselves. Gifts are just unwritten debts and unprofitable affections. These spirits force us to relive the darkest moments of the picture we paint so we may unlearn the ills that have shaped who we are. Here A Christmas Carol feels timely and modern, layering the past with disturbing familiar faces and real-world terrors that harden a boy’s heart and break our Christmas spirit. Magical deflections, pleas to go home, and facing the horrors combine for superb duality and visualizations as children may or may not see spirits and two of the same character appear in the same place at once. Loom factories become massive calculators in an industrial fantasy hitting home the cold hard numbers. Tragedy for many is opportunity for the few, and that’s just good business to see pounds instead of people and exploit their weaknesses accordingly. Shameful humiliations done on Christmas Day are born not out of desire, but agonizing experiments testing the solemn limits of what good people will do for money. Viewers contemplate how far A Christmas Carol will go in examining the the value of human virtue, and Merry Christmas greetings are said for all the wrong reasons – justifying the prayers, warnings, and curses that one day the truth will look us in the mirror. Mining survivors unite in memorial choirs, and the poor make up the difference with happiness and love instead of itemizing priceless intangibles. Halos at the altar suggest salvation, but admitting regret or that love came too late to stop hatred isn’t enough against chilling figures in the dark, haunting drownings, cracking ice, and death shrouds. Tolling bells and heartbeats announce the fatal consequences as we accept our deserved fate. For all the spirited meddling, it is up to us to change and act for the benefit of others without expectation of reward as A Christmas Carol concludes in full Dickensian compassion.
You see, being a Gemini, I have a romance side and a horror side (Surpirze! It’s me, Emerian Rich) which makes me the perfect person to talk to you about Northanger Abbey and its horror-loving heroine, Catherine Morland.
takes readers on a deliciously horrifying journey through wildly imagined apocalyptic landscapes. With each piece, he paints a picture more wild and weird than the last. The vivid imagery all but leaps off the page, pulling the reader further into the mad, broken world Gold has built. 
A Horror Disaster Anthology
HorrorAddicts.net 