One of the rewards you can pledge and get it together with the book in our Kickstarter campaign for the new artbook is the original page from the “Anubis meets Yokai” sketchbook. While working on this series I was making a lot of quick notes in my sketchbook. This double sided page is painted with aquarelle. In the front you got “the unknown”, hidden in the darkness of bamboo forest. In the back – mysterious yokai is hiding between the rocks.

One common characteristic of yōkai is their liminality, or “in-betweenness”. They are creatures of the borderlands, living on the edge of town, or in the mountains between villages, or in the eddies in the river running between two rice fields. They often appear at twilight, that gray time when the familiar seems strange and faces become indistinguishable. They haunt bridges and tunnels, entranceways and thresholds. They lurk at crossroads, writes Prof. Michael Dylan Forster in his superb work The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore (English edition: University of California Press). So it is nothing strange that Anubis has finally been given a chance to meet the yōkai. They do, after all, have much in common.