The Cat That Lived Too Long

The bakeneko ("changed cat") is one of the household yokai of Japanese folklore, a domestic cat that acquires uncanny powers on reaching great age, great size or a long tail. Its reported behaviours are domestic and specific rather than grand: walking on its hind legs, speaking in human words, lighting lamps and licking the oil from them, taking the shape of its dead owner, and animating corpses.

A cat with a forked tail was thought especially prone to become a nekomata, a related and more dangerous two-tailed cat-monster of the mountains and, in its household form, a killer of its own masters. These beliefs crystallised in the Edo period (1603-1868), when cats were common in towns and appeared often in the illustrated ghost-story books and ukiyo-e prints of artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the practice of docking cats' tails has been linked to fear of the forked-tailed nekomata. The bakeneko belongs to a wider Japanese sense that ordinary things and animals turn strange with age, and it survives cheerfully in modern manga and film.