One Hundred Ghost Stories

One Hundred Ghost Stories (Japanese: 百物語, romanized: Hyaku monogatari) is a series of ukiyo-e woodblock prints made by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) in the Yūrei-zu genre circa 1830. He created this series around the same time he was creating his most famous works, the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series. There are only five prints in this series, though as its title suggests, the publisher, Tsuruya Kiemon, and Hokusai wanted to make a series of one hundred prints.^[1][2] Hokusai was in his seventies when he worked on this series, and though his most famous impressions are landscape and wild-life works, he was attuned to the superstitions of the Edo period. This culminated in him creating these yokai prints of popular ghost stories being told at the time. The prints show scenes from such stories, that could be recited during the game of Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai.