Bakeneko

The Bakeneko, literally "changed cat", is a household cat that has acquired supernatural powers and the ability to assume human form, distinct in Edo-period yokai taxonomy from the wilder mountain-dwelling Nekomata, though the two categories overlap in later sources. The earliest sustained literary discussion appears in the kaidan (strange-tale) collection Otogi Boko by Asai Ryoi, first printed in 1666 and modelled in part on the Chinese tale collection Jiandeng Xinhua. The Otogi Boko entries circulated widely through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Bakeneko's standard visual canon was established by the artist Sawaki Suushi in his woodblock-printed yokai compendium Hyakkai Zukan ("Illustrated Volume of a Hundred Demons"), dated 1737 and now held in scattered copies including the Kawasaki City Museum's permanent collection. Suushi shows the Bakeneko in human dress, with a cat's head retained, in the act of dancing on hind legs around a paper lantern. The dancing-around-the-lantern motif is one of the longer-running visual jokes in subsequent Bakeneko illustrations through to Toriyama Sekien's 1776 Gazu Hyakki Yagyō. The folk-belief threshold for transformation is variously given as thirteen years of age, a body weight beyond about three kilograms, or an unusually long tail. Kabuki playwrights drew on the figure for several Edo-era plays, including Hana no Saga Nekomata Zoshi staged at the Edo Nakamura-za theatre in 1853, which set off a small Bakeneko boom in popular theatre. Folklorist Yanagita Kunio catalogued regional Tōhoku variants in his 1910 Tōno Monogatari and his later collection Yōkai dangi (1956), distinguishing the malevolent Bakeneko of the southern Honshū coastal tradition from the more morally ambiguous northern variants. The Bakeneko remains a fixture of postwar Japanese horror cinema (notably the Bakeneko-zoshi films of Daiei Studios in the 1950s) and of manga, including the long-running yokai-illustrated work of Mizuki Shigeru, whose GeGeGe no Kitarō series from 1960 onward has fixed the modern visual reference for international readers.