Victoria Grabosky
お化けかるた
Obake Karuta
The Japanese culture fascinates me and was a great inspiration for my senior project. My passion led me to take a minor in professional Japanese in addition to my concentration in graphic design and printmaking. During my first semester studying professional Japanese, we would play a card game called Karuta to help us practice the Japanese hiragana – one of the writing systems used in Japan. I wanted to recreate the obake karuta deck from the Edo period (1603-1868) in Japan, which featured a different obake, or monster, for each hiragana.
The game originated from a poetry matching game called Uta Garuta. In Uta Garuta, individuals race other players to find the card that matches a poem that is read aloud. It is a highly competitive game that is still played today. The deck I’ve created is a version of Iroha Karuta which uses two sets of 48 cards, with one card in each set representing a sound in the hiragana alphabet.
My goal was to take a Japanese game with Japanese subject matter and make it playable and accessible to an English-speaking audience. Japan has many obake and yokai from the inane Tofu Boy and Fluffy Hair to the downright scary Teke-teke and Slit Mouth Woman. This deck only represents a small amount of the monsters and urban legends that exist in Japanese culture. It features some well-known classics as well as some more obscure ones. I’d recommend doing some of your own research to find your favorite.
