Gotokuneko

By the hearth there's a cat, and it's doing the housework.

It has two tails, which in Japan is never good news — that's nekomata anatomy, the mark of a cat that has lived long enough to turn. But this one isn't eating anybody. It's wearing an iron trivet upside-down on its head like a crown, and it's kneeling at the fire with a bamboo blowpipe, puffing at the embers to bring the flame back up.

It is the most industrious creature in the entire tradition, and it is also Sekien's most elaborate joke.

The joke, unpacked

You need three pieces, and they only lock together at the end.

One. The iron ring the cat is wearing is a gotoku — the three- or five-legged trivet that sits over a hearth to hold a kettle. Standard equipment in every Japanese house.

Two. Gotoku also means "five virtues."

Three. In the fourteenth-century Tsurezuregusa, Yoshida Kenkō tells a small cruel anecdote about a scholar named Shinano no Zenji Yukinaga. Yukinaga was asked to perform the "Dance of the Seven Virtues" — and he forgot two of them. Couldn't recall them, in company. And for the rest of his life he was known as gotoku no kanja, "the Squire of Five Virtues," because five was all he could manage.

So: a man mocked forever for forgetting two of seven becomes "Five Virtues"; "five virtues" is also the word for a trivet; and Sekien draws a cat wearing a trivet on its head.

His caption completes it. He describes the whole thing as something seen in a dream, and wonders: what might this cat have forgotten?

It gets better

The detail that lifts this from clever to genuinely remarkable is who Yukinaga was.

Tradition names him as the author of the *Tale of the Heike* — the great war epic of Japan, the national story of the Genpei War, the work that blind lute-priests recited across the country for centuries. If you know one long medieval Japanese text, it's that one.

And what Kenkō preserved about him, and what Sekien built a monster out of four hundred years later, is that he once forgot part of a dance.

So the chain runs: the man who may have written Japan's great epic → humiliated in a gossip anecdote → the nickname sticks → a fourteenth-century essayist writes it down → an eighteenth-century illustrator makes a pun on the nickname → and the result is a two-tailed cat blowing on a fire with a tube.

That's a literature quoting a literature quoting somebody's lapse of memory.

Kenkō strikes again

This is now the fifth creature in this collection seeded by Tsurezuregusa — an essay collection with no interest in monsters whatsoever, written by a man recording idle thoughts about taste, architecture, pets and social embarrassment.

He warned about the forked-tail cat in the mountains. He remarked on cold high ceilings. He listed which kinds of clutter aren't ugly. He made a joke about a nickname.

And Sekien, four centuries later, read all of it and turned each one into a creature.