The nekomata's earliest attestation in Japanese writing is not, as sometimes stated, Yoshida Kenko's Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), compiled in the fourteenth century, but an entry roughly a century earlier in the courtier Fujiwara no Teika's diary Meigetsuki, dated to 1233, describing a man-eating nekomata at Nanto with the eyes of a cat and the body of a dog. Tsurezuregusa's later passage, portraying a creature of the deep mountains dangerous to travellers and distinct from the household cats familiar to the essay's readers, may be the earliest surviving literary use of the name itself, but the Meigetsuki entry is the older and more reliably dated record of the creature. Both early references treat the nekomata as a mountain predator, genuinely feared rather than merely uncanny, closer to the other man-eating mountain monsters of the period than to the household hauntings later folklore prefers.
Later Edo-period (seventeenth to nineteenth century) sources shift the setting decisively indoors. In this later tradition, the danger is not a monster living apart from human society but an ordinary pet, one kept too long, whose forked tail marks the exact point at which its true nature emerges; some households are said to have limited how long a cat could be kept, or docked a cat's tail, specifically to forestall the transformation. This domestication of the legend, moving the nekomata from mountain wilderness into the family home, is one of the clearer examples in Japanese yokai folklore of a creature's character shifting to match the anxieties of the period recording it.