Image: Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo
Toyo Bunko Museum in Tokyo is presenting 'Scary' Books, an exhibition that looks at how ideas of fear have changed across time and place through rare books and related materials. The show runs from June 3 to September 23, 2026, and gathers works associated with death, supernatural beings, crime, punishment and disaster, all under a theme suggested by the word “scary.”
According to the museum’s exhibition introduction, the project asks visitors to reconsider fear not as a fixed feeling but as something shaped by historical and regional context. The museum notes that some texts were meant to warn readers about frightening truths, some to serve as moral instruction, and others to entertain through the thrill of the eerie. The exhibition brings those different functions together under one interpretive frame, using the museum’s holdings to trace how people have confronted what they found terrifying.
The exhibition is organised into several sections. 'The World of the Afterlife' looks at Buddhist ideas of hell and the afterlife, including concepts shaped by 'The Essentials of Salvation' by Genshin and an illustrated 'Nine Stages of a Corpse' scroll. The museum describes these materials as showing a world of punishment, bodily corruption and religious discipline, with the image of decay used in monastic practice to turn away attachment. These objects are presented alongside discussion of how death and impurity were understood in premodern Japan.
'Japanese Monsters' turns to beings once thought to cause calamity or disease and later transformed into entertainment, while 'Asian Monsters' broadens that inquiry across the region. The exhibition cites texts such as 'Search for the Supernatural' by Gan Bao and 'Record of the Wonders of the Southern Seas' by Ma Huan, as well as books and writings about beings such as the 'flying-head man' tradition. The museum says these stories were collected, recorded and reimagined in different contexts, and that some figures moved from feared presence to cultural character over time.
Another section, 'Cruelty, Judgment and Conflict — The Terror Created by People,' focuses on violence generated within human society. Here the museum considers punishment, revenge and the construction of villainy, including works such as 'Illustrated Explanations for the Imperial Mirror' and a printed account of Ishikawa Goemon. The exhibition text argues that people labelled as “evil” were often shaped by political rivalry, changing values or later moralising interpretations rather than by any single uncontested truth.
The final chapter, 'Confronting Disaster and Disease,' addresses earthquakes, epidemics and other events beyond human control. Among the objects highlighted is a 1855 print of an earthquake satire image, or namazu-e, produced after the great earthquakes of 1854 and 1855. The museum describes such works as responses to real suffering, using visual form to record fear, explain it, or make it bearable. 'Scary' Books continues at Toyo Bunko Museum in Tokyo through September 23, 2026.
