So I own and have read some books featuring Japanese legends, folklore, and ghost stories. However I am looking for a good A to Z reference book on Japanese mythology and a book about Shinto. I have a good basic understanding, but I was hoping for something to grant me a deeper understanding.
Does anyone know of some good books and where I can acquire them?
You could look into Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology and review the source material he references.
He was a pretty prominent mythologist, so if you look into his body of work you might find something useful.
I'll take a look at that. Thanks.
In the interim, anyone else know of anything?
I have ''Japanese Mythology A to Z'', it's useful and enough for for my Planescape games, but not sure about its depth compared to other sources
If you're interested in creatures (Yokai) specifically, I'd recommend Matthew Myers's books. They're lavishly illustrated and contain a great amount of detail about each entity, and are a really fun and amusing read. However, most of the material from the books has been posted on his website, Yokai.com, so actually purchasing them may not be a necessity.
The Great Yokai Encyclopedia is good as well if you want to go really advanced, as its listing of Yokai is the most comprehensive I've ever seen, though it mostly lacks the fun illustrations (It still has some, but not one for each creature), and only goes into extensive detail about a few of the most major ones.
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Encylopedia Mythica is a nice online resource.
Otherwise, I'd offer perusal of my own collection, but you'd have to be in Houston.