What Is a Bakeneko? Old Cats, Split Tails and the Nabeshima Tale

A monk walks home alone after a late evening of linked verse. At a small stream, something leaps at his feet and claws toward his throat. He falls into the water and screams that the cat-monster has him. Neighbors run out with torches and pull out a monk they all know, the prizes from the poetry party soaked in his robe. The attacker was his own dog, who had recognized him in the dark. The essayist Yoshida Kenko tells this story around 1330, and it shows a fear already in the air: that an old cat can turn into a man-eater. This page follows that fear and asks, at each step, who is telling it.

The monk and the dog

Kenko's essay collection, the Tsurezuregusa, is the earliest text we could read that joins the two ideas. In entry 89 someone says a creature called a nekomata lives deep in the mountains and eats people. Another speaker replies that it need not be the mountains: here too, old cats grow into nekomata and take people. The monk hears this, grows careful, and then meets his own dog.

We read the Japanese text on Wikisource, in a printed edition with a modern editor's notes. One note says a nekomata is an old cat whose tail splits in two. That note belongs to the editor, not to Kenko. The essay is also a comic anecdote at a frightened man's expense. It tells us what people feared, not that anyone saw a cat transform. A survey of the subject adds an older diary entry by Fujiwara no Teika from 1233, about a mountain beast that killed several people near Nara. We did not open that diary.

Names and tails

The sources do not agree. The survey of the bakeneko says the two creatures are often confused and that the main difference is the tail. The folklorist Kagawa Masanobu, writing on foxes, also describes the nekomata as fork-tailed cats. Hearn, who lived in Izumo, called a cat with a long tail a nekomata. Treat the neat division as a modern tidying of old, overlapping beliefs.

What people believed about old cats

Hearn wrote in 1894 that kittens in Izumo were sometimes born with long tails, and that few were allowed to keep them. In his account the natural tendency of cats is to become goblins, and that tendency can be checked only by cutting the tail in kittenhood. Cats, he adds, are said to be able to make corpses dance. He also records a Buddhist belief that the cat and the serpent did not weep at the Buddha's death. He gives these as local views.

The survey lists more customs. In some districts a cat kept for twelve or thirteen years was thought to turn, and families chose in advance how long they would keep one. Cats were said to lick lamp oil, which an Edo encyclopedia treated as an omen, and to dance with a cloth on the head. Aged cats often took the shape of old women. For the shape-changing animal that does this best, see the Kitsune.

The Nabeshima cat, a later tale

The best-known bakeneko tale belongs to the Saga domain. In the version told in the survey, a retainer named Ryuzoji Matashichiro is killed after displeasing the lord, Nabeshima Mitsushige. His mother, in despair, dies, and her cat becomes a bakeneko that torments the lord until a loyal retainer kills it.

Note the dates. The survey says a kabuki version was first staged in the Kaei era, 1848 to 1854, and was stopped after a complaint from the Saga domain, which spread the story further. Storytellers and films followed. The survey also reports a theory that the tale dramatizes the real passing of power from the Ryuzoji clan to the Nabeshima. That theory is not proved. So this is a legend first staged in the nineteenth century and set in an earlier age, not a record of that age. The Metropolitan Museum holds two prints from the same world of stage and ghost stories: a Kuniyoshi diptych of about 1850, "The Okazaki Cat Demon," and a Kunichika triptych of 1870 from a kabuki play whose title includes the word nekomata. Their records give titles and dates but no plot, so they show only that cat demons were a popular subject.

Cats honored today

The survey reports that some places honor a cat spirit. At Omatsu Daigongen in Tokushima, it says, a calico cat that avenged an unjust execution is honored as a deity, and visitors pray there before exams. It also names a cat shrine at Shiroishi in Saga. We did not find the shrines' own pages, so treat these as reports. Where a shrine honors a cat, speak of it as worship. It is not a ghost story. Revenge is the motive of many ghost tales, such as those of the Onryo.

How to read a cat tale

• Check the name. Nekomata may mean a mountain beast, a two-tailed house cat or, in Hearn, a long-tailed one.
• Check the tail, but do not rely on it alone. Writers used these terms loosely.
• Check the motive. Many Edo tales are about revenge for cruelty to a cat.
• Check the date. Kenko is about 1330, Hearn 1894, the kabuki tale mid-nineteenth century.
• Ask whether a shrine or temple is involved. If so, it is living practice.

Common mix-ups about the bakeneko

• "Bakeneko and nekomata are the same." They are often confused, and sources disagree on the line between them.
• "The Nabeshima tale is ancient." The survey places the first stage version in the 1848 to 1854 period.
• "Cats were always feared." Hearn reports local dislike, yet a survey also notes cats were brought to temples to guard sutras from rats, and some shrines honor a cat.
• "Every cat tale is about a cat turning evil." Many stories are about a cat's revenge for being wronged.