Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, apprenticed to ukiyo-e master Kuniyoshi since his adolescence, was twenty years old when he first began to make sketches of severed heads and dismembered corpses. Soon he would start to incorporate this imagery into his work, and his vivid and bloody battle scenes quickly caught[...]

In the late 19th and early 20th century, several Western writers who visited the newly-opened Japan assimilated, translated and published a host of weird, scary and stirring stories from the country's ancient folklore. Lafcadio Hearn, Yei Theodora Ozaki and others between them wrote several such vol[...]