Bakeneko

Also Known As: 化け猫 or 化猫, “changed cat”; collectors in Yoshino recorded the same being under the reversed form Nekobake, 猫化け
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: An aged house cat that acquires human shape, human speech and a working knowledge of the household it has lived in.
Role in Mythos: It replaces the person who fed it, usually the old woman of the house, and keeps her seat at the hearth until someone forces it back into its own body.
Relation to Humans: It is a domestic disaster rather than a wilderness one, born of years of ordinary kindness, and the people it destroys are the people who raised it. Hunters in several provinces treated it as a practical hazard and carried countermeasures against it the way they carried powder.

The old woman of the house at Shimamori kept her room and kept her own counsel, and the samurai Akaishi Ikkaku had stopped asking why. He had come back from the next village one night having cut something across the eye in the dark and driven it off. In the morning the old woman’s eye was bandaged. He said nothing for some time. Then he walked in on her without warning and found a big cat standing at the lamp, lapping the oil, and the fight that followed ended with him killing the thing he had been living with. Under the story, told at Hachinohe in Aomori and written down by the Chuo University folklore society in 1980, sits the discovery that the household never made: an old cat had eaten the woman years earlier and had been sitting in her place ever since.

That is the bakeneko, and the name is exactly as plain as it sounds. Changed cat. It is not a breed of monster that lives in a cave somewhere and comes down. It is the animal already asleep by the fire, and what changes it is nothing more dramatic than time. An informant at Ogisu in Suzuka told the Kokugakuin folklorists in 1973 that if you keep a cat a long while, it turns. Nobody in the collected record treats this as an exotic belief. It is said in Aomori in the far north and on Amami Ōshima in the far south, and in the provinces between, in almost identical words.

The story it usually appears in is a substitution. In a tale collected at Aso in Kumamoto by Yagi Sanji in 1933, an old woman called Asagoze kept a cat; the cat killed her, ate her, and went on being her. It was only exposed when it tried to make a meal of a fisherman and took a wound from a charmed bullet called a kiriya, the kind said never to miss, after which it broke and ran for the mountains. When the house was searched, her bones were under the floorboards. A version from Yamasaki in Hyōgo, printed by Shimada Kiyoshi in 1952, has a soldier resting in an old house who wakes to voices in the night calling a name, Seyomon-baba, over and over. He goes to look and finds cats dancing. He cuts at them and they scatter, and the next day in the village he learns that the old woman called Seyomon-baba is nursing a wound. Human bones came out from under her veranda.

There is very little physical description anywhere in this material, and the absence is not laziness on the collectors’ part. While the disguise is working, there is nothing to describe. What gets recorded instead is the accumulating wrongness of an ordinary woman: the shut door, the meals taken alone, the refusal to be looked at directly, the eye that happens to be injured on the same morning as the monster’s. The body only arrives at the end, and even then the accounts give almost nothing beyond size and age. A big cat. An old cat. The horror is that it was upright and talking an hour before.

The other great strand of bakeneko tradition is almost unknown outside Japan, and it is the better one. It is a duel, and the cat is winning on arithmetic. At Tanba in Hyōgo, in a batch of tales printed by Amano Mayumi in 1937, a boar hunter goes out on a night shoot and a cat in the shape of a woman comes to fetch him and to kill him. He looses twelve arrows and she knocks every one of them aside with a pan lid. Then he shoots a thirteenth, a hidden arrow the cat did not know he had, and in the morning she is dead under the eaves of a house. The Suzuka version arms the hunter with a gun and the cat with the lid off the tea kettle, which turns every ball he fires; the cat has watched him load and knows precisely how many he has, and he only kills it because he quietly slipped an extra charge in on top. When he goes to collect the body it is his own cat.

By the time the fisherman-folklorist Mori Suekichi recorded the belief at Setouchi on Amami Ōshima in 1993, it had hardened into procedure. Cats know how many bullets a hunter has made. When he has fired the last one, the cat comes for him in its other shape. So you keep a single iron ball back, apart from the rest, at the end of your belt. A man who did that shot the thing that came for him and found he had killed the cat off his own hearth.

Certain places collect the stories. On Nekodake, a peak in the Aso range, the boss of all the bakeneko was said to keep house, and a traveller who took lodging at the foot of the mountain, in a version set down for the Miyazaki prefectural record in 1992 from a Takachiho telling, discovered too late that the old woman receiving him was the boss herself; a cat working as her maidservant warned him and he ran. Mitsui Takesaburō heard essentially the same story from his mother in the Yoshino hills of Nara and printed it in 1937, with the same courtesy at the centre of it. The lost traveller is put up for the night. The mistress of the house is an old cat. He is minutes from being eaten when a cat he once kept, years ago, intervenes and gets him out. Even here the animal is keeping accounts. It remembers who fed it.

What it can do follows from what it is. Years in a house teach it the household: whose voice to use, who is expected home, which errand will draw a man out into the dark alone. It takes a woman’s shape most often and an old woman’s shape almost always, speaks, walks upright, dances with others of its kind when it thinks it is unobserved, and drinks the fish oil out of the lamps. It is strong enough to kill an armed adult and patient enough to spend years not doing so.

Its limits are just as domestic. It has to be inside a life to work, which means it can be caught out by anything the life does not explain, an injury in the wrong place, a face in a mirror, a meal eaten wrong. It can be cut and it can be shot, and dying returns it to a cat. Above all it is beatable by the one thing it depends on, which is counting. It knows the arrows in the quiver and the balls in the pouch, and it does not know about the thirteenth arrow or the ball kept at the end of the belt. A creature that has spent a decade watching you is also, necessarily, a creature you have spent a decade watching.

The version most English readers meet is a different animal from any of this. In the Nabeshima story, a cat laps up the blood of a woman wronged by the lord of Saga and goes to the castle to avenge her, and that story became a national craze in 1853, when the Nakamura-za in Edo staged it as Hana Sagano Nekoma Ishibumi-shi, the “Sagano” of the title a thin pun on Saga. The Saga domain complained and the run was stopped, which did for its fame what such complaints usually do. It ran on through kōdan recitation and into the ghost-cat films of the early twentieth century, and it is why the bakeneko arrives in English as a spirit of revenge. The villages that actually told these stories were mostly not talking about revenge. They were talking about the thing at the hearth, and about how long it had been there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bakeneko?

A bakeneko is a Japanese yokai: a domestic cat that has lived long enough to gain human shape and human speech. The name means “changed cat.” In the folklore collected across Japan it is usually a cat that kills the woman of the house it lives in and then takes her place at the hearth.

How does a cat become a bakeneko?

Age alone. Field records from Aomori to the Amami Islands agree that keeping a cat for a long time is what turns it, with no curse, ritual or particular provocation required. An informant in Suzuka, Mie, put it flatly in 1973: keep a cat a long while and it turns.

What does a bakeneko look like?

Almost nothing in the collected accounts describes it, because for most of any story it looks like a perfectly ordinary human being. Witnesses notice behaviour rather than anatomy: a door kept shut, meals taken alone, an injury that matches a wound dealt to a monster the night before. Its true form, a large old cat, usually appears only when it dies.

How do you kill a bakeneko?

By outcounting it. Hunters’ tales from Hyōgo, Mie and Kagoshima all turn on the same trick: the cat parries arrows or bullets with a pan or tea-kettle lid and knows exactly how much ammunition its opponent has, so the man survives only by holding back one shot it has not counted. On Amami Ōshima this became a working rule, with hunters carrying a spare iron ball at the end of the belt.

Is the bakeneko the same as the nekomata?

They are close relatives and the boundary is genuinely blurred, with the nekomata conventionally distinguished by a tail split in two. Japanese collectors filed near-identical stories of a cat eating an old woman and impersonating her under both headwords, which tells you the tellers themselves did not always separate them.