Hikeshiba

Hikeshiba... what the hell IS that...  It sounds somehow familiar -- OOOOH, it's an updated version of the Hikeshi-baBAA, the strange old woman in white *WHO EXTINGUISHES LIGHTS*!  This youkai used to blow out lanterns, but now she's flicking light switches.

It's a truly creepy image, with its hollow eyes and eaten-away lips; it reminds me of the horror comics I collected as a kid.  But what a *fantastic* updating of the youkai... it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out what is was.  I kept getting distracted by the gruesome youkai.

In Japanese, the suffix 'baba' or 'babaa' seems to mean 'old woman', 'grandmother'... and a host of other, less complementary things like 'witch', 'hag' and even 'ogress', which might have been meant literally.  The babaas WERE youkai, after all, and they are all OVER Edo period folklore, though some of them are much older.

Apparently, the Hikeshi-baba first saw print in the _Kaibutsu Ehon_ ("Illustrated Book of Monsters"), an 1881 book featuring woodblock prints of yōkai, or "creatures from Japanese folklore". Painter Nabeta Gyokuei modelled it after Sekien Toriyama's illustrated yokai collections from the 1770s and 1780s, with a picture of each yokai and some information, like... well, like an Edo period _Monster Manual_ (AD&D reference).

Grand work, Ehime, and startlingly original; both the art and the updated youkai.  I suspect you've actually "updated" a lot of youkai in your dA account, especially with the various names... but as I don't read or speak Japanese , most of it's lost on me.  It has to be a pretty bloody obvious pun for me to get it, you menace from the rising sun, you.