Beware: The Magical Cats of Old Japan

When it comes to yokai, supernatural creatures, and the magical cats of Japanese folklore, the gamut truly does run from adorable to deadly. We'll start with a little background, and then move on to adorable. Fair warning, it only gets scarier from there. The common belief in Japan was that many, if not all, animals were henge, or shapeshifters. Cats, with their ability to stretch to seemingly impossible lengths or to slip into very tight spaces, were right at home in the shapeshifter category, along with the native kitsune and tanuki. Their predatory natures placed them, despite their pampered lives, into some of the darker reaches of folklore. In contrast to what's coming next, the mannequineko or beckoning cat was one of the few truly benevolent, helpful sorts. Like most folklore, there is more than one story to explain its origins. In the most famous version, a feudal lord is caught in a thunderstorm and takes shelter under a tree. Bad idea, but then he sees a cat beckoning to him from the gate to a small temple. He hadn't noticed the temple before due to the temple's small size and the darkness of the hour. Curious, he goes to investigate, and so narrowly avoids a lightning strike that would have killed him. In gratitude, the lord made a large donation to the temple, called gotokuji, and to this day it is known as the lucky cat temple. While the mannequineko's claim as a magical cat might seem a bit tenuous, despite its obvious ability to foresee the future, that cannot apply to the beckoneko. The name roughly translates as changing cat, and it is a true shapeshifter. This could range from simply walking about on their hind legs and mimicking human speech to completely impersonating a human so well that it is only when they inadvertently reveal their true cat nature that they are discovered. This will be especially apparent when we get to the subject of the beckoneko yujo, or cat courtesans, later. As shapeshifters, beckoneko varied from mere pranksters to vampiric spirits who drained the life energy of their owners. In other tales, the beckoneko developed a taste for human flesh. In one famous story, a beckoneko killed and ate the mistress of a prince, and then assumed her likeness in turn to drain the life of that prince. She cast a spell that put his guards to sleep at night so she could work her will, but one guard thwarted her by sticking a dagger in his thigh to keep himself awake, and thus saved the prince's life. While the beckoneko were often very dangerous creatures, as already mentioned, that was not necessarily the case. For example, we come to the beckoneko yujo, or cat prostitutes, of the Edo period, 1603-1868. This period saw a great flowering of arts and literature in Japan, both of the high brow and decidedly less so varieties. One example of the latter was the shirenban. These were guides to the walled pleasure quarters of old Japan, giving accounts of the diversions available there, including encounters with lovely courtesans, both human and rumor had it, non-human. There were accounts of clients awakening in the middle of the night to find their paramour hunched over a meal of fish bones or the like, casting a cat-like shadow, or possibly turning on the clients themselves. Far from being discouraging, the accounts triggered a fashion among the courtesans to deliberately give the illusion of being beckoneko. They requested gifts of expensive fish delicacies from their clients, they kept cats as pets, and possibly did their makeup to give a cat-like appearance. Such yujo in turn were very popular and actively sought out by clients seeking a more exciting supernatural experience, real or imagined. Whether beckoneko yujo existed as established folklore or were invented in the lurid shirenban genre is open to debate, though in the end it probably makes no difference. They're folklore now. Having dealt with the relatively benign beckoneko, it's time to ratchet up the nastiness just one more notch with the nekomata, which translates as either fork-tailed cat or again cat meaning its new life as a nekomata rather than having a forked tail, which it was also depicted as having. There was a belief in Japan that a cat's spiritual power was contained in its tail, leading to the common practice of docking a kitten's tail to prevent them from accumulating spiritual power. The belief was, the longer a cat lived, the longer its tail grew. At a certain point, the tail would split down the middle creating two tails, and a nekomata was born, first mentioned in the Kamakura period 1185 to 1333. And unlike the beckoneko, nekomata were an older variety of creature, incredibly vicious and yet still not the very worst of the lot, which we'll get to later. An account from 1233 mentions several people attacked, killed, and eaten by a nekomata, described as a mountain dweller having cat's Such accounts make no mention of any supernatural aspect of the attacks. The creature was considered a mountain predator which simply craved human flesh and was powerful enough to get it, and all such incidents were reported as facts. By the Edo period, however, the nekomata was solidly established in the pantheon of supernatural creatures and their size increased with each retelling. By the mid-1800s, they were about the size of a human, not counting the tails. It was around this time that nekomata passed from being a fearsome animal to a purely supernatural creature with the origin as described previously. The nekomata also became more a subject of art, with the creature often depicted playing a shamasen. Why? No one really knows, but it was possibly meant to be somewhat ironic as the shamasen uses cat skin to get its distinctive sound. Regardless of how it began, over time the nekomata began to lose its fearsome aspect and became more akin to the bakuneko in reputation, especially since it was no longer depicted eating people at the drop of a hat. Only now and then. Which brings us at last to the kasha. You'll note that this yokai does not have neko in its name anywhere. That's because the name actually means flaming cart and originally had nothing to do with cats at all. It had to do with funerals and the Buddhist version of hell. This legend, like that of the nekomata, began in the Kamakura period, but unlike the nekomata, it never did get cute. If a person had led a wicked life, it was believed that a flaming cart, sometimes driven by demons, sometimes just the cart itself, would descend from the sky during their funeral and snatch them away, body and soul, and carry them directly to hell. There was a popular art genre called hell scrolls with just such depictions meant to be a warning to the wicked. Nothing to do with cats, right? Well, it didn't until it was transformed in the Edo period by an artist named Toriyama Sekiin. He drew an illustration of a kasha coming to snatch a dead body. Only now he drew the kasha as a great demonic cat. Why? Again, no one knows. Artistic license, perhaps, but his influence as an artist of yokai was considerable. Now, the kasha was not a flaming cart, but a flaming demonic cat, and people began telling stories to account for it. In these versions, the kasha, despite its demonic nature, was no longer hell's messenger, but a morio, a type of yokai fond of rotting human flesh, especially entrails. Sometimes the kasha was also believed to be a type of nekomata, but this wasn't universal. Mostly, it was simply demonic. It was believed that a cat left alone too long with a dead body could transform into a kasha and devour the corpse. Cats were often banished from funerals for that reason. Sometimes a coffin was weighed down with rocks before the funeral to prevent the body being snatched away by a hungry kasha descending in flames from the sky in search of a snack. And so, from the adorable to the demonic, that's the story of magical cats of old Japan.