Bakeneko

Nobody in Japanese folklore trusts the cat, and the reasons they gave are so specific and so observational that you can basically reconstruct what it was like to share a house with one in 1750.

The bakeneko is the ordinary house cat, gone wrong. One tail — that matters, because its nastier relative the nekomata has a tail split in two, and counting tails is how you know how much trouble you're in. It can take human shape. It can speak. It can curse a household, or possess someone, and in the worst stories it kills a woman and takes her place in the family for years.

But before any of that, it does small things. And the small things are why the belief existed.

The lamp

Here's the material fact underneath the whole tradition, and it's wonderful.

Lamps in Edo Japan burned cheap fish oil. Cats — fed mostly on grain and scraps in a household that couldn't spare fish — wanted it badly.

So the cat would get up on its hind legs at the lamp stand and reach for the flame, stretching, standing like a person, its face lit from below by the light it was trying to drink.

Sit in a dark room and watch that happen once, and tell me the animal isn't transforming.

Then stack the rest of it. A cat's pupils change shape through the day, from slits to black discs, so its eyes are visibly not fixed. Stroke it in dry weather and its fur throws sparks — actual visible static, in a house lit by one flame. It walks without sound. It can be beside you when you were certain it was in another room. It stares at nothing, in a corner, for a long time.

The bakeneko is what you get when you take a small predator that performs uncanniness nightly and treat the performance as evidence.

The dance

The signature image, and the one that makes people fall in love with this creature: the bakeneko puts a napkin or towel on its head and dances.

Upright, on its hind legs, cloth draped over its ears, dancing in the dark of the kitchen when it thinks nobody's watching.

There's no violence in it. It isn't a threat. It is the specific, dreadful suggestion that your cat has a private life — that when you leave the room, it gets up and does something you were never meant to see.

The great cat scandal

The famous one is the Nabeshima disturbance, out of Saga.

A cat's owner is killed. The cat avenges him — going after the household of the lord responsible, appearing night after night as a woman, draining and tormenting the family, until a loyal retainer works out what's happening and puts a stop to it.

That story went to the kabuki stage and from there across the entire country, and it is more or less single-handedly responsible for the image of the monster cat in Japanese popular culture. Every haunted cat in every film since is standing in its shadow.

The same animal, adored

And yet. The exact same country, with the exact same cats, produced the maneki-neko — the beckoning cat in every shop window in Japan, paw raised, inviting money through the door.

Cats guarded silkworms, which were an entire regional economy. Cats killed the rats that ate the rice. They were genuinely, materially valuable, and people knew it.

So the cat sits in Japanese folklore as two opposite things at once: the animal you set on a shelf by the till to bring in luck, and the animal you suspect of having eaten your grandmother and worn her clothes for a year. Same species, same house. Nothing about the cat changed. Only which set of nights you chose to remember.