The Morikami’s summer show is a grotesque gem entitled “Ghosts, Goblins and Gods: The Supernatural in Japanese Art.”

It’s a tour of the underworld, of demons, monsters of the night, malevolent spirits that have traditionally beset the imagination of a culture that prides itself on its sense of order.

But nightmares have never really gone away from the Japanese imagination, right up through Godzilla - strangely absent from this show - to the vestigial presence of manga and anime.

A sense of the grotesque is visible in most cultures, but the Japanese variety is particularly unsettling because of its emotional intensity.

From the shrieking ghosts in films like Onibaba and Kurosawa’s Dreams, to the works on exhibit at the Morikami, you can take it on one level as displaced social anxiety; on another level, it’s stunning artwork. The artworks in the exhibition at the Morikami are mostly woodblock prints from the Edo and Meiji periods - mid to late 19th century - that are so delicately rendered they look like pen and ink.

It’s a nightmare world where giant earth spiders assert dominion, where old women flaunt their withered bodies in sexual display because they are really demons in disguise - remember the inhabitant of Room 237 in Kubrick’s The Shining?

Many of the prints on view are based on folktales, as with “Ghost of Okiku,” the story of a servant who refused to become the mistress of a samurai. When she accidentally breaks a ceremonial plate, the samurai kills her, then throws her body into a well, from which her spirit rises to incessantly count the plates and to wail over her misfortune.

In fact, ghosts are all over the show, often as mothers who die young or in childbirth and who restlessly haunt their loved ones. (Most of the depictions of Japanese ghosts are female, which ought to be the subject of a dozen feminist doctoral theses.)

Also portrayed are serpents called kirin - not the beer, but the mythic Japanese creature with the head of a dragon, the mane of a lion and the legs of a deer. And of course there are the shape-shifting foxes - the joker in the deck of Japanese folklore.

Not everything in the show is a woodblock print; “Mysterious Creatures of the Cosmos, Part I” consists of a silk handscroll done in ink and color. It depicts yokai - monsters - that are recognizably human beings, but with faces that are distorted and out of scale, as if ravaged by some disfiguring disease. Likewise, “Skeleton Meditating Above Waves” by a priest named Izumi Chito, is a beautifully surreal depiction of a skeleton hovering in a contemplative pose slightly over the surface of the ocean.

There are also some artifacts, such as a temple mask with a gigantic phallic nose. Even something as prosaic as roof tiles or a beam end are decorated with snarling ogres, to frighten off harmful influences that might otherwise befall the house.

This is a portrait of a demon-haunted world you won’t soon forget.