Kasha: It Wasn't Always a Cat

What is Kasha?

Ka is fire. Sha is a cart, a vehicle. A kasha is a burning cart.

Modern yokai books usually describe kasha as a monstrous cat that appears at funerals and snatches the body from the coffin. That is one late stage of a long history. The historian Katsuda Itaru traces how the burning cart became a corpse-stealer, and how the corpse-stealer became, among other things, a cat.

The cart of the dying

In Buddhist tales of the Heian and Kamakura periods, the fire cart belongs to the deathbed. As a sinner dies, a burning cart driven by the wardens of hell appears to carry them away. The tales use it as a sign of what a life has earned, and as a reason to die well, with the right prayers and practices.

In this form the kasha is not a creature at all. It is a vehicle, and what it carries is the soul of someone who deserved it.

Into the storm

In the Muromachi period, Katsuda argues, the fire cart moved outside the dying person’s room. A sudden storm at a funeral — black cloud, thunder, wind and rain — came to be read as the sign that the dead was going to hell.

By the late sixteenth century, stories appear in which the thunder itself carries off the body. Around the same time, tales spread of Zen monks driving the kasha away from a funeral.

Along the way the dead stop being necessarily wicked. The kasha becomes a danger to any funeral, a thing in the sky that might take the body from the procession.

Many faces

From about the late seventeenth century, the thing in the storm is often said to be a cat — an old cat, sometimes a temple cat. But the Edo period never settled on one answer. Kasha was also said to be a tanuki, a tengu, or a mōryō, a spirit that eats the dead.

Twentieth-century records keep both strands. The Miyazaki Prefectural History notes accounts from several places in Miyazaki of a body taken by kasha in the middle of a funeral. Elsewhere it is a cat, a dark cloud, a hundred-year-old creature, or simply a word for what happened.

Appearance

There is no single one. First a burning cart; then a storm; then a cat, a tanuki, or something unnamed in a cloud. Our illustration chooses the moment of change: a funeral on a wet road, the coffin closed, and a burning wheel in a sky that is just turning black.

Behavior and abilities

• It comes at death. In every form, its business is the dead.
• It takes the body. From the late sixteenth century on, the threat is to the corpse, not the soul.
• It brings weather. Black cloud, thunder, and sudden rain announce it.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

From the late sixteenth century, the answer is a monk: Zen priests in many tales drive the kasha off from the coffin. Folk practice added others, such as keeping cats away from a body before the funeral.

Fire cart and later imagery

Documented history. A Buddhist fire cart that fetches sinners at death (Heian–Kamakura); a storm read as the sign of damnation (Muromachi); thunder that steals bodies, and monks who drive it off (late sixteenth century); a creature identified as a cat from about the late seventeenth century, and also as a tanuki, tengu, or mōryō; twentieth-century records of bodies taken during funerals.

Later imagery. Today kasha is almost always a cat — huge, burning, and leaping on the coffin — and often merged with the two-tailed nekomata.

The longer history is stranger than the cat. What came for the dead kept changing shape, because the fear of what might happen to a body on its last journey stayed the same.