Bakemono no e (Ã¥ÂÂç©ä¹Â繪, "Illustrations of Supernatural Creatures"), also known by its alternate title Bakemonozukushie (Ã¥ÂÂç©尽繪, "Illustrated Index of Supernatural Creatures"), is a Japanese handscroll of the Edo period depicting 35 bakemono from Japanese folklore. The figures are hand-painted on paper in vivid pigments with accents in gold and silver pigments. Each bakemono is labeled with its name in hand-brushed ink. There is no other writing on the scroll, no colophon, and no artist's signature or seal.
Bakemono no e is held by the L. Tom Perry Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, US and is part of the Harry F. Bruning Collection of Japanese rare books and manuscripts. Harry F. Bruning (1886âÂÂ1975) acquired the scroll from Charles E. Tuttle (1915âÂÂ1993) in 1952. The artwork is dated to c. 1660 as according to the description of the scroll in Tuttle's catalog 266 (October 1952), which would make it the arguably the oldest extant example of the , or monster index, genre. Most of the bakemono illustrated are also found in other scrolls and books of the Edo period, with a few exceptions.
The scroll came to the attention of Japanese scholars and the famous manga artist Shigeru Mizuki (1922âÂÂ2015) in 2007 when digital images of the scroll were shared with Kà Âichi Yumoto (), then curator at the Kawasaki City Museum (). Yumoto was surprised to find an image of a three-eyed bakemono clearly labeled "Nurikabe" in the BYU scroll that matched an unlabeled illustration of the same figure in a scroll Yumoto owns. The Nurikabe image later became the topic of scholarly debate in Japan.
The following is a list of bakemono featured in Bakemono no e, along with their backgrounds.