Indie Spotlight: Jon O’Bergh's serialized story The Yōkai

 

Welcome to our Indie Spotlight series, in which TNBBC gives small press authors the floor to shed some light on their writing process, publishing experiences, or whatever else they'd like to share with you, the readers!

Today's spotlight shines on Jon O'Bergh and his novel The Yōkai, which is being serialized for free through substack. 

Climate Change, a Horror Novel, and the Dragon Ichimokuren

 

Just west of Nagoya in central Japan lies Mount Tado, legendary home of Ichimokuren, a one-eyed dragon god with the ability to control the weather. He appears as a giant serpent with either a single eye or one good eye and one destroyed eye. Sometimes he is depicted as a single floating eye in the sky, surrounded by winds and rain. At other times he wanders around Mount Tado in the form of a hinotama—a floating ball of fire. According to yokai.com, an illustrated database of Japanese supernatural folklore:

 

“When he leaves his shrine, black thunder clouds skirt the top of rooftops, and heavy rains fall and winds blow all around. These can swell into powerful storms which cover land and sea. His storms are powerful enough to topple trees and break boulders, fling people into the air, knock down houses, and capsize boats.”

 

Over 1,500 years ago, Shinto priests founded Tado Taisha Shrine at the foot of the mountain. In the superstitious past, when clouds formed around Mount Tado, locals believed that Ichimokuren was moving about. They became fearful of the damage he might do. In order to pacify him and minimize destruction, they enshrined him in Tado Taisha as an incarnation of the one-eyed Shinto deity of blacksmithing, Amenomahitotsu no kami. His shrine was built with no door in order to allow him to come and go as he pleases.

 

Ichimokuren represents a type of yokai with powers that bring both blessings (in the form of rainfall needed for crops) and dangers (destructive, frightening storms). Yokai (sometimes spelled yōkai) is the collective name for a wide range of supernatural occurrences that includes ghosts, goblins, witches, demons, anthropomorphic household items, strange hybrid animals, mysterious lights, and more. Dual characteristics—alternately helpful and sinister—are emblematic of many yokai, similar to creatures of legend in other cultures.

 

Among the more well-known yokai are the kappa (human-like turtles or reptilians that inhabit rivers and ponds and have a reputation for luring people to be drowned), the yurei (ghosts that appear as ethereal figures with long, dark hair, which Western audiences will recognize from The Ring and The Grudge movies), and the yamauba (a witch similar to Baba Yaga that Hayao Miyazaki incorporated into the character Yubaba in his anime feature Spirited Away).

 

With Ichimokuren’s connection to weather, he offered an ideal character to make an appearance in my novel The Yōkai as a frightening harbinger of climate change. The main character, Asami Watanabe, is studying yokai for her college thesis. A gang of demons, upset over the degradation of their environment, appears one day and demands a ghost story nightly to spare her life. However, each story must include an actual person who dies. Asami confronts a moral dilemma, forced into choosing who lives and who dies, until she teams up with a group of college friends, a female wizard, and a shapeshifting yokai cat to fight back. I’ve drawn on Japanese legends for many of the locations, characters, and background elements in the novel. The horror stories that Asami creates also become part of the plot.

 

At its heart, The Yōkai is about a shy young woman who learns to tap into her inner strength and overcome her adversaries. By the end of her journey—which is a classic epic with obstacles, trials, and descent into a demonic underworld—she has a moment of realization, a profound insight about herself and the nature of good and evil. I’m currently publishing chapters for free in weekly installments on Substack at https://jonobergh.substack.com/p/the-yokai-story-index. Readers can subscribe to receive the short chapters by email, or read them online on Substack.

 

I recommend that you immerse yourself in the world of Japanese yokai such as Ichimokuren. These strange, scary, entertaining entities have much to reveal to us about the human condition.

 

Jon O’Bergh is a musician and author of horror novels. Out Front Magazine described his novel Shockadelica as “a book that must be on your to-read list,” and Aurealis Magazine named it “Reviewers’ Pick of 2022.” He has also released over a dozen albums in a variety of styles, including the critically acclaimed album 13 Witches. You can find more information about Jon at https://obergh.net.