Tokyo ? Halloween is a frothy foreign import in Japan, an excuse to have a party and eat sweets.

Monsters, though, are a more serious matter. They are indigenous and reputed to be everywhere. One is called Akaname, the Filth Licker, and he haunts dirty bathrooms. Using his long, lascivious tongue, he eats bathtub scum.

As if that were not scary enough, there is also the matter of shame. In this exceedingly well-scrubbed country, if word got out that there’s a Filth Licker in your bathroom, your reputation would be ruined.

The Halloween season, then, is an opportunity to shine a festive light on the Filth Licker and his creepy kin. There are thousands of them, and collectively they are known as yokai, a word that is formed from the Japanese characters for “otherworldly” and “weird.”

Yokai were tormenting and delighting the Japanese hundreds of years before Halloween chocolates and pumpkin-colored cupcakes showed up in this country’s supermarkets.

Professional chroniclers of yokai say the spooky creatures are remarkably similar – in their folkloric origins and unspeakable powers – to the ghosts, zombies, skeletons and assorted night stalkers who have wandered for centuries through the Western imagination.

“Anything that is unexplainable, anything that is scary, anything that is really weird can be considered the doings of a yokai,” said Kenji Murakami, author of a yokai encyclopedia and 19 other yokai-related books. “We do not have a tradition of Halloween, but I think yokai are perfectly appropriate for Halloween. They help explain the inexplicable, and they are fun.”

Part myth, part tall tale, part pop culture, yokai haunt mountains, swamps, subway stations and toilets across Japan. One yokai likes to plunge a large, hairy disembodied foot through the roofs of rich people’s houses. Another enjoys eating the livers of unborn children. A third is made entirely of discarded dinnerware and is more dangerous to himself than to others.

This fall, yokai are featured in a new book, “Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide,” by the husband-and-wife team of Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt.

Yoda, 37, grew up in Tokyo, where she says she spent a good part of her elementary school years devising strategies to avoid being mutilated by one of Japan’s best-known yokai, Kuchisake Onna, the Slash-Mouth Woman.

This yokai is a shapely, well-dressed, but violently insecure young woman who wears a mask over her monstrously disfigured mouth, which reaches from ear to ear and is bursting teeth.

“First of all, she asks you if she is pretty,” Yoda said. “If you say, ‘Yes, you’re pretty,’ she’s going to cut your mouth just like hers. But if you say she is not pretty, she is going to cut your mouth anyway.”

How do you escape her?

“She likes candy,” Yoda said. “The best way to escape is to always carry candy, and when she comes near, throw it as far as you can and run like crazy.”