Nekomata

The nekomata is the older and darker of Japan's two great cat monsters, and it enters the record in an unusual way.

Not as a legend. As news.

1233, in a courtier's diary

Fujiwara no Teika — one of the most important poets in Japanese history, the man who compiled the Hyakunin Isshu — kept a diary called the Meigetsuki.

And in 1233 he wrote down that a nekomata near Nara had killed and eaten several people in one night.

That's not a ghost story. That's a note about a current event, in the journal of a very serious man, filed alongside court appointments and the weather.

A hundred years later, Yoshida Kenkō put it in the Tsurezuregusa — the Essays in Idleness, one of the great works of Japanese prose:

> In the mountain recesses, there are those called nekomata, and people say that > they eat humans.

Two of the most respected writers of the medieval period, reporting a man-eating cat in the hills as a thing that was going around.

Then Edo brought it indoors

The original nekomata is a wild thing — a mountain predator, and in Edo accounts it had grown to the size of a dog or a boar.

But at some point the fear moved house.

The Edo version says this: a cat kept too many years becomes one.

Not a different species. Yours. The one on the mat. Give it long enough and its tail splits in two, and it stands up.

There were illustrated guides — the picture-books of the 1730s and 1770s — that showed the transformation by age. Here is a cat at ten years. Here it is at twenty. Here is what it is by then.

And the practical consequence was a real and widespread belief that you should not keep a cat long-term. Not out of cruelty. Out of a sense that there was a term limit, and that going past it was asking for something.

What it can do once it turns

Walk upright. Speak. Take human form — and it's almost always an old woman.

Conjure strange fires.

And then the signature ability, which nothing else in the tradition has quite like this:

It commands the dead to dance.

The accounts describe it gesturing — with paw and with tail, in a ritual pattern — and corpses getting up and moving to it.

A cat, standing on its back legs in a graveyard, conducting.

This isn't unique to the nekomata; the corpse-stealing cat-demon that appears at funerals to carry off the wicked shares the territory. Japanese folklore had a settled conviction that cats and the dead have an arrangement, and that a cat should be kept out of the room where a body lies.

Two explanations for where it came from

One is scholarly. Chinese tales of the xiānlí — leopard cats that acquire powers with age — and the general Chinese principle that any animal, given enough years, accumulates something.

The other is domestic, and I find it more interesting.

Edo Japan had a practical custom of docking cats' tails.

There's a reading that runs the fear backwards. If tails get cut short as a matter of routine, then a cat with a long, full, forked-looking tail is a cat that got away with something — one that was never handled, never managed, never brought into the household's arrangements.

The monster isn't the cat. It's the unsupervised cat.

That, incidentally, is exactly the shape of the belief about age. The danger isn't feline. It's duration. A cat that has been in your house long enough to have watched everything, learned the routine, and outlived its usefulness as a mouser.

The picture that everyone remembers, from the 1737 scroll, gets this exactly right: the nekomata as a woman-cat playing the shamisen.

Not attacking anyone. Sitting up, dressed, performing — doing a person's accomplishment, in a person's posture, having spent a great many years in a person's house watching how it's done.