Fūri

A small cat-like animal with leopard markings, living up in the trees, that rides the wind — leaping enormous distances between trunks, crossing gullies and cliff faces on a gust.

That's the fūri, and it comes with two of the strangest specifications in the whole imported bestiary.

It hunts with a wand

The fūri does not chase anything. It carries a magic stalk of grass, and it points the stalk at a bird or a small animal, and the animal freezes. Then it walks over and collects it.

A predator with a tool. Nothing else in this entire tradition has equipment. Monsters here have claws, teeth, illusions, appetites and grievances — the fūri has a device, and it uses it the way a person would.

It can't stay dead

The second clause is better.

The fūri is easy to kill. Almost trivially so — it's small, and a decent blow will finish it.

And then the wind revives it. Any breeze that reaches the body brings it back. The only way to make it stay dead is to shatter its skull or break its bones badly enough that there's nothing left to restore.

A creature whose element is also its spare life. You can kill it as often as you like, out in the open, where the air moves.

Where it came from

The fūri is an import, and its paper trail is unusually clean. It's the Chinese fengli, the "wind leopard-cat," documented in a tenth-century encyclopedia and later in the great Ming pharmacological compendium. It reached Japan through reference books — the Japanese-Chinese illustrated encyclopedia of 1712 — and from there onto Sekien's page in 1781.

That route matters, because it's the single largest immigration channel for Japanese monsters and it is almost never described as one. A remarkable number of creatures in this tradition did not arrive through travellers' tales or migrating folk belief. They arrived because Japanese scholars were compiling encyclopedias from Chinese sources, and monsters were in the source material, filed between the real animals.

The dream-eating baku came this way. So did the water-tiger, the mountain one-legged man, the drought demon, the beast that knows every creature's name. There's a whole shelf of them, and each one picked up Japanese habits in transit.

The fūri also has a medical entry, which is how you can tell it came through a pharmacopoeia: its urine was prescribed for leprosy. Wind-beast for wind-illness — Chinese medicine's correspondence logic, applied to a cat that flies.

What it probably was

In 1920 the great naturalist-folklorist Minakata Kumagusu proposed an identification, and it's persuasive: the colugo — the so-called flying lemur of Southeast Asia, which is neither flying nor a lemur, but glides between trees on a membrane stretched from neck to tail.

Rivals have suggested giant flying squirrels, civets, or slow lorises.

Put a photograph of a colugo beside Sekien's plate and the argument mostly makes itself. A soft-faced, mottled, tree-dwelling animal that launches itself into the air and crosses an impossible gap without wings is exactly the kind of thing that becomes a wind-riding cat by the time it has been through three encyclopedias in two languages.