Kasha

Also Known As: 火車, “fire cart”; also written 化車, “changed wheel”; obsolete reading kwasha; regional variants kyasha, kasha-neko, kusha
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology, Buddhist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: It arrives inside thunder, black cloud and fire and lifts a corpse out of a sealed coffin, leaving the box suddenly weightless in the bearers’ hands.
Role in Mythos: It began as the Buddhist fire-cart that hauled sinners to hell and became, by the late seventeenth century, the aged cat that robs funerals and opens graves.
Relation to Humans: It interrupts the one ritual a family cannot afford to have go wrong, and much of the Japanese wake as it was actually practised, the unbroken vigil, the caged cat, the blade on the coffin lid, was built to keep it out. Whether it takes only the wicked depends entirely on who is telling it, and the accusation outlives the funeral.

The pallbearers always noticed it in their shoulders. One moment the coffin carried the honest dead weight of a grown man, and a breath later it rode as light as an empty crate. Nobody stopped to look inside. From Niigata down to Miyazaki there was a standard explanation for that sensation, and it was that the body had been taken by the kasha.

The name means fire cart, and for a long stretch of Japanese history that is all it was. In the hell paintings of the medieval temples, the jigoku-zōshi and the rokudō-e, sinners were hauled toward their punishment in burning wagons dragged by oni, and the *Uji Shūi Monogatari* has a warden of hell pulling exactly such a flaming cart to collect the damned, sometimes before they had finished dying. Priests used the image the way priests use such images. Behave, or the cart comes for you.

Then the cart grew a body. Through the early Edo period the thing that came for corpses was drawn as an ogre: a gokusotsu, one of the warders who torment the damned, or the ox-headed and horse-headed pair who keep hell’s gates, and by the latter half of the sixteenth century as Raijin himself, in his tiger-pelt loincloth with his ring of drums. The *Kii Zōdanshū* of 1687 preserves an account set at Ueda Manor in Echigo in 1574, where a funeral was ambushed in heavy rain and thunder and the corpse was very nearly carried off, saved only by a priest of Untō-an who pinned it with esoteric power and fainted from the effort. The woodcut beside the story shows the thunder-ogre. The text itself never manages to describe the attacker as anything firmer than a black cloud with intent.

The cat arrived late, and it arrived inside a story about loyalty. The earliest known telling of a cat-shaped kasha sits in the *Kōsekishū* of 1693, where an elderly Jōdo-shū priest in Kyoto overhears his cat of thirty years talking in a human voice at night. The animal admits to being the chief bakeneko of the capital and the commander of every cat that turns into a kasha to take a body. Its subordinates had settled on a profligate noblewoman due to die the next day. She was also the priest’s patron, and the cat could not stomach it, so it betrayed its own side and handed over the weakness: a Daruma rosary, which could kill them. The priest told it to attack at full strength anyway and fight him honestly. At the funeral the sky blackened, rain came down in sheets, and as the lightning bent toward the coffin the priest struck with his beads and the weather broke clean. His cat came home three days later with one eye hanging out of its head. He nursed it. It died.

Toriyama Sekien drew the creature as a cat in his *Gazu Hyakki Yagyō* of 1776, and after that the cat was settled. His caption is matter-of-fact about how common the lore already was: bodies taken from funeral grounds and from graves all over the country, with stones laid in coffins and chants muttered in some districts to stop it. Its true nature, he wrote, is an ancient cat. A nekomata.

In the village accounts the shape is consistent enough to picture. A huge cat, old past ordinary reckoning, sometimes with a forked tail, arriving inside fire or inside a low cloud that smells of a storm about to land. Suzuki Bokushi set down the best version of the encounter in his *Hokuetsu Seppu* in 1841. A death in the farming hamlet of Saburōmaru, in the snow country near Untō-an, forced the mourners to carry the coffin out through weather that had not let up for days. Partway along the road the wind turned, the cloud came down over them, and a ball of fire flew in and closed around the coffin. Inside the fire was an enormous twin-tailed cat with its paws on the lid. The priest Hokkō chanted, swung his iron nyoi, and caught the animal on the head hard enough that its blood went across his robe. The temple still keeps the robe. They call it the kesa of the man who brought the kasha down.

The countermeasures are where the fear shows its real size, because almost all of them are household objects. A razor left on the coffin lid at Yawatahama in Ehime. A knife laid on the body at Tsumagoi in Gunma, and the same at Kasukawa. At Kamikuishiki in Yamanashi, where a kasha was said to live near the temple, the funeral was held twice and a rock went into the coffin for the first one. On Himakajima in Aichi they used the reed out of a loom, trusting its fine mesh against a cat more than a century old. At Kumagaya in Okayama they beat a myōhachi at it. At Saigō in Miyazaki the mourners said twice, before setting out, that they would not let the kasha feed on this.

Miyazaki took it furthest. In the era when the dead were buried sitting up in round barrel coffins, a second wake was held after the funeral rather than before, four days in all, and through that stretch somebody stayed with the body at every hour, with close relatives of either sex sleeping beside it overnight. Cats were shut in cages and kept out of the rooms. A record from Saito describes the funeral of a man whose conduct had been poor: fine weather turned foul without warning, the kasha came for him, and a monk sat down on the coffin and swept it away with his fly-whisk. What he had driven off, he said, was a cat.

Not every district gave it fur. On the mountain pass between Ayaori and Miyamori, in the Tōno country of Iwate, the corpse-thief is called kyasha and looks like a woman with a money-bag knotted into the front of her sash. She waits on a small hill along that road. She lifts bodies out of coffins at funerals, and when there is no funeral she opens graves and eats what she finds there. The same name attached to the same crime at Minamimimaki in Nagano. Elsewhere the being shed the name entirely: a corpse-eater at Akihata in Gunma went by tenmaru and was held off by capping the round coffin with a bamboo basket before burial, while around Izumi in Kagoshima the things that turn up at a grave once the mourners have gone are called liver-takers.

Temples collected trophies. A tail, said to have come away when the head priest of Seigen-ji near Yamagata drove a kasha-neko off a rich man’s corpse, was given to the Hase Kannon hall at Nan’yō as a charm against evil and is still put out for the public at New Year. A temple in Setagaya kept claws. In 1812 a local writer went and looked at four of them.

The commonest thing said about the kasha is that it only takes the wicked, and the commonest thing wrong with that is that the sources do not keep the rule. Chihara Kyosai, writing in 1833, traced the belief from Izumo and Satsuma across to the eastern provinces and had no patience with any of it. What bothered him was not the monster but the gossip: a coffin blows away in a squall, and inside the week the neighbours have decided the dead man earned it. He also thought the name was idiotic and proposed importing a better one from the Chinese classics, so his own illustration is captioned with the characters for mōryō and then tells the reader to pronounce them kasha regardless. Suzuki Shōsan’s *Inga monogatari* is blunter still about the timing. A village headman’s wife in Kawachi, grasping with her servants and disliked by everyone who met her, was seen on the highway inside a cluster of light like a moving torch, held by both wrists by two men eight shaku tall, who carried her off somewhere nobody could name. She was at home in bed when the witness came to ask. She died on the third day. She had not been dead when they came for her.

What the kasha can do follows from the job. It travels as weather and arrives as weather, so there is no approach to watch for: black cloud, thunderclap, a wind strong enough to lift a loaded coffin clear off the shoulders carrying it. It can take a body out of a closed box without opening the box, which is why the sudden lightness is the only evidence anyone ever gets. Where it works in the open the aftermath is a corpse torn apart and left high on a rock or hung in a tree. Age is the engine underneath all of it. A cat that lives long enough stops being a cat, and the kasha is what waits at the end of that process.

The limits are just as specific, and they are almost all either Buddhist or sharp. A monk walking in the procession can reclaim a body by flinging his rosary at the coffin, saying the right words over it, or stamping his seal onto the lid, and the beads in particular keep turning up as the thing that actually wounds. Iron works. So does any blade: the razor, the knife, the fine mesh of a loom reed. Noise helps. A stone in the coffin confuses it. An unbroken human watch defeats it outright, which is the most domestic weakness in Japanese folklore, and the reason families sat up for four nights with the doors shut and the cat in a basket.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kasha in Japanese folklore?

A kasha is a yōkai that steals corpses, usually at funerals or from fresh graves. The name means fire cart, and originally the kasha was exactly that: a burning Buddhist vehicle that carried sinners down to hell. From the late seventeenth century onward it was more often imagined as an enormous aged cat that arrives inside thunder, black cloud and flame.

Why is the kasha a cat?

The cat form came from a conflation with older Japanese lore about the nekomata, the forked-tailed old cat that robs the dead. The earliest surviving story of a cat-shaped kasha dates to 1693, and Toriyama Sekien fixed the image for good when he drew the kasha as a cat in 1776, writing that its true nature was an ancient cat. Shigeru Mizuki argued instead that the feline look came from the Chinese corpse-robbing mōryō.

How do you stop a kasha from taking a body?

Blades, Buddhist objects, noise and an unbroken watch. Villages left a razor or a knife on the coffin, put a stone inside it, laid a loom reed over the body, or beat a percussion instrument at the procession, while a monk could reclaim a corpse by throwing his rosary at the coffin, chanting over it, or pressing his seal onto the lid. In Miyazaki the family simply never left the body alone, sitting with it through four days and shutting the household cats in cages.

Does the kasha only steal the bodies of wicked people?

Not reliably. Many tellings say the kasha takes only those who piled up evil deeds in life, which suited the Buddhist sermon the creature came wrapped in, but later accounts do not hold to it and some of its victims are plainly not villains. One 1833 writer complained that the rule worked backwards in practice: a coffin lost in a storm was enough to get the dead person’s character shredded by the neighbours.

Where in Japan does the kasha appear?

Almost everywhere, and often under a different name. Accounts run from Niigata and Gunma through Yamanashi, Aichi, Nagano and Iwate down to Okayama, Ehime, Kagoshima and Miyazaki. In Tōno in Iwate and at Minamimimaki in Nagano it is called kyasha and appears as a woman rather than a cat, while Gunma has a corpse-eater called tenmaru and Kagoshima has liver-takers at the graveside.