Nekomata

Also Known As: 猫又
Region/Culture: East Asia (Japan)
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A supernatural cat whose tail has split in two, credited with walking upright, speaking in a human voice, conjuring fire, and raising and puppeteering the dead.
Role in Mythos: The malevolent end-state of a cat that has lived too long, haunting both households and mountains as a devourer and a manipulator of the people around it.
Relation to Humans: It turns on the very households that fed it, taking the shape of the recently dead, tormenting or devouring its former masters, and repaying long service with ruin. Fear of it shaped real behaviour, so that people kept cats only a few years and cropped their kittens’ tails so the tail could never fork.

The record is dated to the eighth month of 1233, and it is not a story but a note, jotted down by one of the most careful men of his age. Fujiwara no Teika, poet and diarist, wrote in his Meigetsuki that a beast had appeared in the hills near Nara and killed several people in a single night. It had the eyes of a cat and a body as large as a dog, and those who lived through it gave it a name: nekomata, the forked cat. That is the first time the word surfaces in Japanese writing, and already it carries almost everything the creature would come to mean. A cat that had grown too large. A cat that ate people. A cat that had stopped being a cat.

A century later the priest and essayist Yoshida Kenko set the belief down more plainly. In the deep mountains, he wrote, there lives a thing called nekomata, and it eats men. He told it as common knowledge, the kind of rumour that kept travellers to the daylight paths. Then he undercut it, because Kenko was that sort of writer. He recorded the case of a renga poet, a Buddhist monk fond of linked verse, who had heard the rumour and lived in dread of it. Walking home alone one night beside a stream, he felt something rush out of the dark and fasten onto him, and he went down screaming that the nekomata had come for him at last. Neighbours ran out with torches. What they found clamped to the shaking priest, tail beating the ground with joy, was his own dog, delighted to have located its master.

The joke lands because the fear behind it was real, and over the centuries it hardened into something people arranged their lives around. Two kinds of nekomata came to be told of, and they were two faces of one idea. There was the giant of the mountains, wild from birth, big as a hound or larger, that hunted deer and boar and the occasional lost person on the high trails. And there was the more intimate horror, the house cat that simply lived too long. Keep a cat past its natural span, the belief ran, and one night its tail would split down the centre into two, and the animal that had slept at the foot of your bed for a dozen years would rise up on its hind legs a monster.

What it became was frightening precisely because it stayed familiar. The nekomata kept the shape of the cat it had been, only heavier and coarser, its two tails stirring behind it with a will of their own. It could stand and walk upright like a person. It could speak in a human voice, sometimes in the voice of someone lately dead. Woodblock artists of the Edo period, Toriyama Sekien among them, drew it as an old cat seated in a lamplit room, oddly erect, its doubled tail curling into the shadows, caught in the moment between pet and predator. The unsettling thing was never the claws or the size. It was the intelligence in the eyes, the sense that the creature knew you, had always known you, and had only been waiting.

Its powers ran to the graveyard. A nekomata was said to raise the dead and set them moving, conducting the stiff corpses in a slow dance with flicks of its paws and its two tails, a puppeteer pulling strings that only it could see. It could call up fire and fling balls of flame that took hold of houses and swept down whole streets. It bewitched the living, slipped into human form to walk among them, and made a hunting ground of the household that had raised it, borrowing the faces of the family’s own dead to get close. The cat you fed becomes the thing that eats you.

Because the danger was thought to arrive with age and to sit in the tail, people acted on both counts. Cats were kept a few years and then turned loose or given away before they could ripen into something worse, and kittens had their tails clipped short so that no tail was left to fork. Over generations this pressed itself into the animals themselves. The stub-tailed cats that grew common across Japan, and the prized bobtail that followed them, carry in their shortened spines the memory of a country that was quietly afraid of what its cats might turn into.

The weakness of the nekomata was written into its origin. It was a thing made by time, so time withheld undid it. A cat killed young, or cropped, or simply not kept long enough, never crossed the line at all. And for all its fire and its dancing dead, a transformed cat could still be found out and cut down like anything else that bleeds. The tales that end well tend to end the same way. A household grows uneasy about the old cat, sets a watch on it, catches it at its strange midnight work, and kills it, and in death it dwindles back to what it had been hiding under all along: an ordinary animal, grey about the muzzle, its tail split neatly in two.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a nekomata?

A nekomata is a supernatural cat, or yokai, in Japanese folklore whose tail has split into two. It exists in two forms, a giant wild cat that lives in the mountains and preys on people, and an ordinary house cat that has grown old and transformed into a monster. In both forms it is regarded as malevolent, credited with speaking, walking upright, conjuring fire, and raising the dead.

What is the difference between a nekomata and a bakeneko?

The clearest difference is the tail: a nekomata has two tails, while a bakeneko has one. The two are closely related cat yokai, but the nekomata is considered older, larger, and far more dangerous, where a bakeneko is often merely mischievous. In folklore, an ordinary cat may first become a bakeneko and then, with greater age, a nekomata.

How does a cat become a nekomata?

According to Edo-period belief, a house cat becomes a nekomata by living too long. As the cat ages past its natural span, its tail was thought to split down the middle into two, marking its change into a monster that could walk upright, speak, and turn on its owners. The mountain-dwelling nekomata, by contrast, was believed to be born wild and monstrous rather than transformed.

What powers does a nekomata have?

A nekomata is said to raise and control the dead, moving corpses like puppets with gestures of its paws and tails. It can also conjure fire and hurl flames that burn down houses, take human shape, speak in human and even in dead voices, and bewitch the living. These powers make it one of the most feared of the Japanese cat yokai.

Why did people in Japan cut off cats’ tails?

Because the nekomata’s transformation was believed to begin with the tail splitting in two, people cut kittens’ tails short so that the tail could never fork and the cat could never become a monster. Cats were also often kept for only a few years for the same reason. This long-standing practice is one folk explanation for the popularity of short-tailed cats and the Japanese bobtail.