Bakeneko (化け猫): The Cat That Learns Human Ways

What is Bakeneko?

On Tashiro Island, off the coast of Miyagi, a fisherman’s family kept a cat for thirty years. One night it sat up and recited a jōruri — a whole dramatic ballad, the kind sung to the shamisen in the puppet theatre — to the people of the house. In another telling from the same island it turned into a samurai and crossed the water. The island has a cat shrine, and the cat is worshipped there.

That is a bakeneko, as it was told in 1927: a cat that has lived long enough to learn what people do, and one night does it.

What does bakeneko mean?

Bakeru is to change form, to turn into something else; it is the same word in obake, a thing that has changed. Neko is a cat. Bakeneko is the changed cat — not a species, but a stage an ordinary cat can reach.

How it reaches it was a matter of age, and of care. In Nanao, on the Noto peninsula, in 1937, people said that when you took in a cat you had to set a term for it — a fixed number of years — or it would grow old and become a bakeneko. In Okinawa in 1931 the belief was simpler: cats gain the power to change as they age. Foxes and tanuki, which do the shapeshifting on the mainland, were absent there; the cat was the one animal that turned into something.

Appearance

A bakeneko looks like a cat until the moment it does not. The uncanny detail can be as small as a human voice from the next room, an upright shadow on the paper screen, or a sleeve where there should be fur.

Nineteenth-century prints made the change explicit. In one, a cat stands upright in a woman’s kimono and tall geta, looking back over its shoulder. In another, nine cats dance in a circle; the big black-and-white one at the back wears a torn braided hat, one has a hand towel tied round its head, one holds up a fan. The costume and the dance became the standard way to show a cat that had crossed over.

What the bakeneko does not have is a second tail. The forked tail belongs to the nekomata, and giving it to a bakeneko draws a different animal.

Behavior and abilities

• It speaks, or sings. The Tashiro cat performed a whole ballad.
• It dresses. A kimono, geta, a towel, a fan.
• It dances. Usually with others, at night, in the pictures.
• It takes human form. A samurai, a woman, a traveller.

Some bakeneko are frightening; many are only astonishing. The revenge cat that drinks lamp oil, kills its owner’s enemy, and wears the dead woman’s shape belongs to the famous Saga cat-monster plays and the stage, not to every cat that learned to talk.

One tail or two

The confusion is old and the distinction is useful. The bakeneko is a cat that changes: it keeps its tail and learns human ways. The nekomata is a cat whose tail has split in two, a sign of a different kind of transformation, with a history of its own in the mountains and in medieval writing. The kasha, which steals corpses from funerals, was said from the late seventeenth century to be a cat as well. Three cats, three creatures, and popular culture has been folding them into one since the Edo period.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

Nothing applies to every bakeneko, because there is no one bakeneko. The term set for a cat in Nanao was a precaution, not a cure. What ends a revenge-cat play does not touch a cat on an island that has learned to sing — and on Tashiro, nobody wanted it to end. They built it a shrine.

Documented tradition and later imagery

Documented tradition. An old cat that gains the power to change: a thirty-year cat on Tashiro Island that recited jōruri and became a samurai (1927); the Nanao rule of setting a term when taking in a cat (1937); the Okinawan belief that cats change with age where foxes and tanuki do not (1931); Edo and Meiji prints of cats standing in kimono and dancing in costume.

Later imagery. Modern horror and games combine the bakeneko with the two-tailed nekomata, the revenge cat of the Saga plays, and the giant monster cat, and give the result a fixed set of powers.

The older cat is smaller and closer. It has been in the house for thirty years. It has watched everything. One night it sits up, and starts to sing.