Nekomusume

Also Known As: 猫娘, “cat daughter”; collected again in 1830 as Nameonna, 嘗女, “the licking woman”, and recorded in one late Edo case report as Nekokozō, “cat boy”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A cat’s nature surfacing in a human girl, carried in the old books by one detail only, a tongue rough enough to catch on skin.
Role in Mythos: She is the name Japan reached for whenever a girl’s appetites or movements looked more feline than human, and it has been pinned in turn to a picture-book eccentric, a sideshow performer, a real child in a Ushigome tenement and a modern comic-book heroine.
Relation to Humans: She lives inside households rather than haunting them, and the people around her are family, neighbours, landlords and paying customers rather than victims. The unease she produces is domestic and social, the discovery that someone at the table or under the floor does not eat, move or feel the way the rest of the house does.

The young man had married into the house for her face. She was the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Awa, and on the first night, once the lamp was turned low and the bedding laid out, she started at his hairline and worked downward. Her tongue was rough. Not damp and yielding the way a tongue is supposed to be, but dragging, snagging, pulling at the skin like a cat cleaning a kitten. He was out of the bedding before she reached his waist and out of the province not long after, and the name people gave her afterwards stuck to her for the rest of the record: cat daughter.

That is the whole of it. The story occupies a page and a half in the fifth volume of Ehon Sayo Shigure, a collection of strange tales written and illustrated by Hayami Shungyōsai and printed in Osaka in 1801, where it sits under the heading “The Strange Woman of Ashū”. Ashū is the old name for Awa, which is modern Tokushima. She is beautiful, she is rich, she has an inexplicable compulsion to lick men, and her tongue is wrong. Nothing in the tale transforms. She does not grow ears, she does not take an animal shape, she does not avenge anything, and no second version of her story exists anywhere.

The word itself is as plain as a word can get. Neko is cat. Musume is daughter, or girl. When a book of comic verse on monsters gathered her up again in 1830 it renamed her the licking woman and was careful about where it put her, filing her not with the yokai but with the eccentrics, the human oddities, the people whose habits were strange enough to earn a stanza. Edo drew that line and then almost immediately stopped bothering to draw it, which is how a woman with a medical peculiarity became a monster.

She had company. A comic picture-book of 1793 already uses the name licking woman without explaining it, which means readers were expected to know it. The same books are full of a small recurring figure, the oil-licking kamuro, a serving girl who creeps to the paper floor lamp after the household is asleep and drinks the oil out of it, and the resemblance was noticed at the time. In 1850 the Owari retainer Miyoshi Shōzan wrote down a version he had collected at Shinagawa, about an inn girl who licked the lamps dry, and then flattened his own ghost story in the final lines: when your tongue is sore, he explains, oil warmed by a lamp feels good on it, and there are a few people who fall into the habit. It is the most Edo sentence ever written about a monster.

The sideshow grounds had their own cat girl, and hers is the least comfortable strand. Through the 1750s and 1760s the misemono booths of Edo, Kyoto and Osaka went through a fashion for exhibiting disabled people, and in 1769 a woman with a cat-like face was shown at Asakusa billed as a nekomusume. Asakura Musei, who spent a working life rebuilding the misemono trade out of handbills, diaries and city gossip, gives her about a line and a half. A girl billed as a crab, with two fingers, was working the same circuit around the same time. Neither of them made much impression, and the taste for that kind of booth did not reach its height until the 1770s and 1780s, by which point the cat girl was already yesterday’s ticket. She was a woman with a face and a life and a name of her own, and what survives of her is the smell of lamp oil and damp matting and a season’s takings.

The fullest cat girl in the whole Edo record is not in a ghost book at all. Fujikawa Kan, setting down the talk of the late shogunate in a manuscript called Ansei Zakki, describes a girl called Matsu who lived at Yokoteramachi in Ushigome in 1850 and had an intellectual disability. From early childhood she ate the fish heads and guts thrown out with the tenement rubbish. She went along the tops of fences without touching her hands down and she went under the floorboards after rats, and she ate those too. Under a neighbour’s floor, in the dust and the cold and the dark, she would wait out a rat for as long as it took; when she came up with it the man of the house would press a coin into her hand and tell her to say nothing to her mother. The mother tried doctors. She tried shrines and temples. She tried beating it out of her, and when that failed she had the girl’s head shaved and placed her with a nun, and the girl went on picking fish guts out of the rubbish until the nun sent her home. The neighbourhood children hunted her for sport and never once caught her, because she went up onto the roofs where they could not follow. The adults were delighted with her, because she cleared their rats. The original manuscript never calls her a cat girl; it calls her cat boy and cat priest, and it records the neighbours saying among themselves that some deep karma must have handed her a cat’s life. A modern historian retitled the episode, and that is how she joined this entry.

The cat girl that everyone actually pictures was built in 1936. Urata Shigeo, one of the pioneers of street kamishibai, wrote a karmic-retribution play called Nekomusume for the pitch corners. His heroine has a cat’s nature because her parents made their living killing cats and stretching the skins over shamisen. Her eyes catch light at the sight of a rat, her ears flatten, she runs it down and eats it alive, she cries in a cat’s voice, she goes over the rooftops. It was a hit, and within a season the same corners were running a Lizard Girl and a Snake Girl. Teachers complained loudly. From 1937 the Metropolitan Police Board’s entertainment section began censoring kamishibai scripts, and the cat girl craze is named as the thing that started it.

In June 1958 a young artist signing himself Azuma Shin’ichirō drew his own version, Kaiki Nekomusume. His heroine is named Midori; her father killed a huge black cat and the curse of it gave her the animal’s nature, and she arrives in the world by climbing out of her buried mother’s grave. The smell of grilling saury brings the cat into her face. Azuma Shin’ichirō was Mizuki Shigeru. Nine years later a cat girl walked into the pages of Shōnen Magazine in “Nekomusume and Nezumi-otoko”, and in 1968 into the first Kitarō television series as a guest in episode twenty, and by 1971 she was a fixture with claws, a ribbon and a temper. Everything the modern figure is known for was assembled between a wartime pitch corner and a 1960s weekly.

What she can do depends entirely on which century she is caught in. The picture-book woman can do exactly one thing and does it to a bridegroom. Matsu could climb where her tormentors could not and could strip a tenement of rats faster than any trap, which is a real power and was treated as one by people who paid her in copper for it. The kamishibai girl and everyone descended from her got the whole animal: night eyes, retractable claws, a drop from a roof that lands right, and a face that comes forward when she is angry. The limits run the other way and are far more interesting. Nothing in the old record explains where she comes from. Nobody kills her, marries her, banishes her or buries her. There is no charm against her, no season she belongs to, no shrine, no second telling, no origin she can be traced back to and no myth that is hers alone. Every time she is given a proper story, a named modern author turns out to have written it. What the Edo books hand over is a tongue and a habit, and then they shut.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Nekomusume?

Nekomusume, meaning “cat daughter”, is a Japanese figure best known today as a cat-girl yokai, but the Edo-period record describes human women and girls rather than spirits. The name was applied to a woman in a 1801 collection of strange tales whose tongue was rough like a cat’s, to a sideshow performer exhibited at Asakusa in 1769, and to a disabled girl in a Tokyo tenement in 1850.

What is the original Nekomusume story?

The oldest narrative is “The Strange Woman of Ashū” in volume five of Ehon Sayo Shigure, a picture-book by Hayami Shungyōsai printed in 1801. A beautiful daughter of a wealthy family in Awa province, modern Tokushima, had a compulsion to lick men; on her wedding night she licked her new husband from head to foot with a tongue as rough as a cat’s, and he fled. She was called Nekomusume from then on.

Is the Nekomusume a bakeneko?

Not in the old sources. The Edo texts never show her transforming and a comic-verse book of 1830 explicitly filed her among human eccentrics rather than among yokai. The link to the bakeneko, Japan’s shape-changing cat, belongs to twentieth-century retellings that gave her claws, ears and a cat’s face.

Where does the modern cat girl come from?

From street kamishibai, not from folklore. In 1936 Urata Shigeo created a karmic-retribution paper play called Nekomusume about a girl who inherited a cat’s nature because her parents killed cats for shamisen skins, and it was popular enough to be blamed for the police censorship of kamishibai that began in 1937. Mizuki Shigeru drew his own Kaiki Nekomusume in 1958, and that line runs directly to the Nekomusume of GeGeGe no Kitarō.

Was the Nekomusume dangerous?

No source treats her as a killer or a threat. The alarm she causes is social and domestic, a household or a neighbourhood discovering that one of its own eats, moves or behaves like an animal. The most detailed case on record, a girl called Matsu in 1850s Ushigome, was bullied by local children and quietly valued by local adults for catching their rats.