Bakeneko

Region/Culture: Japan
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifting supernatural cat (yokai / kaibyo)
Mythical Attributes: An aged cat that gains the power to assume human form, walk upright, speak, dance, curse, and command the dead.
Role in Mythos: A domestic familiar turned household menace, most often an agent of vengeance for wrongs done to its keeper or to itself.
Relation to Humans: The bakeneko lives among people as an ordinary cat for years before it changes, which makes its betrayal intimate rather than a threat from outside. It may repay cruelty with a curse, devour and impersonate a member of the household, or in gentler tales simply haunt the edges of domestic life.

The first sign was usually the lamp. In the small hours, when the fish oil in the andon burned low and the house had gone quiet, the cat would rise onto its hind legs, brace its forepaws against the paper frame, and drink. Its face, lit from below by the failing flame, took on an expression no animal should wear: patient, deliberate, almost thoughtful. People in the old quarters knew what that meant. A cat that licked the lamp oil was a cat that had begun to change.

The bakeneko is a house cat that has lived too long and learned too much. The name means “changed cat,” and the change it undergoes is both physical and moral. An ordinary mouser, fed on grain scraps and the patience of its keepers, grows old in the warmth of a particular hearth, and somewhere past its twelfth or thirteenth year it crosses a line. In Ibaraki and Nagano they said twelve years was the threshold. In the far south, in the Okinawan districts, thirteen. In one part of Hiroshima the belief ran darker still: keep a cat seven years and it will kill the one who raised it. Families hedged against this by deciding in advance how long a cat would be allowed to stay, the way one might set the term of a dangerous loan.

What it becomes is hard to see at first, because at first it looks like nothing at all. The transformed cat holds its ordinary shape through the day and sheds it only at night, growing larger than any cat should be, its tail lengthening like something poured rather than grown. That tail was the tell. Edo-period Japan came to distrust long-tailed cats so thoroughly that people took to docking them, and the short-tailed cats common in Japan today may be the descendants of that long suspicion. Beyond the size and the tail, the bakeneko’s body is unremarkable, which is precisely the horror of it. The thing that pads across the tatami at midnight is wearing the skin of the animal that slept on the bedding at noon.

Its talents accumulate with its years. A bakeneko can walk upright, speak in human words, and throw a cloth or napkin over its head to dance, and there are accounts from as late as 1909 of Tokyo tenement-dwellers swearing their cats had been caught mid-jig. It can take human shape, most often that of an old woman, and slip into a household so smoothly that no one notices the substitution until the appetites change. It can curse. It can summon and puppet the dead. In the mountains it was said to run with wolves, leading them down onto travelers. The gentlest of these creatures simply danced and stole oil. The worst of them ate people and went on wearing their faces.

One story holds the shape of all the rest. A man named Takasu Genbei lost his pet cat, and around the same time his mother withdrew from the world. She stopped seeing friends, took her meals alone in her room, turned strange. When the family finally spied on her through a gap in the door, they saw not a woman but a cat-shaped monster in her clothes, gnawing the carcasses of animals. Takasu cut the thing down where it sat, still half-disbelieving, and waited. After a day the corpse reverted to the body of his long-missing cat. He pried up the floorboards of her room and found her skeleton beneath them, the bones picked clean.

The most famous bakeneko belongs to Saga, to the Nabeshima clan. A retainer of the daimyo Nabeshima Mitsushige displeased his lord over a game of Go and was put to the sword, and the dead man’s mother, grieving aloud to her cat before she took her own life, gave it the opening it needed. The cat lapped at her blood, swelled into a bakeneko, and went into the castle. Night after night it tormented the lord, until a loyal retainer named Komori Hanzaemon hunted it down and ended it. The tale outgrew its own telling. Staged in the Kaei era, it drew such crowds that the Saga domain lodged a formal complaint to shut the production down, which only spread the rumor further. Behind the ghost story sits a real grievance: the Ryuzoji clan once held power in Hizen before the Nabeshima eclipsed them, and the resentment of a displaced house found a convenient shape in a cat.

The powers all follow from a single fact, that the bakeneko was a creature of the household before it was a monster of it. It knew the rhythms of the home, the faces, the voice of the woman who fed it, and so its revenge takes the form of mimicry and intimacy turned wrong. It does not besiege a house from outside. It comes from within, wearing the household’s own.

Its weaknesses follow the same logic. For all its accumulated cunning, the bakeneko remains a cat, and a cat can be cut down by a determined hand, as Komori Hanzaemon and Takasu both proved. In one Harima tale a bakeneko was killed even after it shielded itself with a tea-kettle lid and an iron pot, brought down because the old families of the district knew how to deal with such a thing. The animal that becomes a bakeneko earns its power by surviving, by waiting, by being underestimated for years on end. That patience is also the thing that gives it away. A cat that drinks the lamp oil has shown its hand, and a watchful house still has time to act.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bakeneko?

A bakeneko is a shape-shifting supernatural cat from Japanese folklore, a type of yokai whose name means “changed cat.” It begins as an ordinary house cat that, after living many years, gains uncanny powers such as walking upright, speaking, and taking human form. The bakeneko is usually portrayed as a domestic animal that turns on the household it once lived in.

How does a cat become a bakeneko?

A cat becomes a bakeneko by growing old, with regional traditions setting the threshold at twelve years in Ibaraki and Nagano and thirteen in parts of Okinawa. Some areas held that any cat kept long enough would eventually transform, and in one Hiroshima belief a cat raised seven years would kill its keeper. A cat could also become a bakeneko after being abused or after licking human blood, which is how the famous Nabeshima cat began.

What powers does a bakeneko have?

A bakeneko can shapeshift into a human, most often an old woman, and can walk on its hind legs, speak human words, and dance with a cloth draped over its head. The more dangerous ones curse people, possess them, manipulate corpses, and in mountain tales lead wolves to attack travelers. The darkest stories describe a bakeneko devouring a member of a household and then impersonating that person.

What is the Nabeshima bakeneko legend?

The Nabeshima bakeneko legend tells of a cat that avenged the Ryuzoji family against the Nabeshima clan of Saga. After a retainer was executed and his grieving mother killed herself, her cat licked her blood, became a bakeneko, and tormented the daimyo Nabeshima Mitsushige nightly until the retainer Komori Hanzaemon destroyed it. The story became a hugely popular stage play in the Kaei era, and the Saga domain’s attempt to suppress it only made the tale more famous.

What is the difference between a bakeneko and a nekomata?

The main difference is the tail: a bakeneko has a single tail, while a nekomata’s tail has split into two. The nekomata is generally regarded as an older, larger, and more malevolent cat, more skilled at human speech and spiritual power, whereas the bakeneko ranges from mischievous to murderous. Both evolve from aged cats, and the line between the two is often blurred in the folklore.