If Your Cat Ever Stands on Its Hind Legs, Don’t Let It See You Watching | Bakeneko

Edo, a winter night around 1790. A woman wakes to a sound at the lamp. Her cat is standing at the lamp stand on its hind legs, like a small man, with a hand towel on its head, licking the fish oil from the wick. And it has stopped licking. It is looking at her. She does the one thing her mother told her: she lies back down and closes her eyes. Because if your cat stands up, you did not see it.

This is the bakeneko, the changed cat. The thing in a courtier’s diary of 1233 that killed several people in Nara in one night. The monk who wrote down what the capital said about the forked cat, and the priest who met one on the road home (it was his own dog). Why Japanese cats have bobbed tails: centuries of insurance against the second tail. The cat that licks the lamp oil, dances with a towel on its head, and talks when it thinks no one is listening. The cat of Saga castle, which killed the lord’s mistress and wore her face at his side for months, until one retainer kept himself awake with a knife in his own thigh and saw the shadow on the paper screen. The old woman of Okabe on the Tōkaidō, who took in young women for the night, and the cat stone that is still behind the temple. The kasha, which steals the dead out of their coffins, and why the rules of a Japanese funeral were really rules about cats. And why, of all the animals in the house, it had to be the cat.

The three rules, if you live with a cat in Japan:
#1 If it stands on its hind legs, do not let it see you watching. Lie still. A cat that knows it has been seen does not stay a cat.
#2 Keep it away from your dead. Shut the door, lay a blade on the chest, carry the second coffin.
#3 Never kill one, whatever it has done. The house that kills a cat is cursed for seven generations.

More rules that keep you alive: If Something Grabs Your Ankle in the River, Bow to It (Kappa) → · If You Hear “Po… Po… Po…”, Never Look Up (Hachishakusama) → · Japan’s 1979 Panic (Kuchisake-onna) →

Does your cat stand up when it thinks you are asleep? Tell me in the comments. And tell me how old it is.

0:00 The lamp: a woman, a cat, a rule
1:06 猫又 The forked cat: the diary of 1233
2:35 行灯 The lamp: oil, the towel dance, the cat that spoke
3:55 鍋島 Saga castle: the cat that wore her face
5:55 岡部 The Tōkaidō: the old woman of Okabe and the cat stone
6:50 火車 The funeral thief: the kasha, and why the cat
8:03 掟 The three rules

Animated as woodblock prints built in code. Sources: Fujiwara no Teika, Meigetsuki (1233, 8th month, 2nd day); Yoshida Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa (c. 1330), section 89; Terajima Ryōan, Wakan Sansai Zue (1712); Negishi Yasumori, Mimibukuro (the talking cat); the Nabeshima cat disturbance of Saga in its kōdan versions (Komori Hanzaemon) and in A. B. Mitford, Tales of Old Japan (1871, “The Vampire Cat of Nabeshima”, Itō Sōda); Segawa Jokō III, Hana Saga Nekomata Zōshi (Nakamura-za, 1853); the cat witch of Okabe and the cat stone of Kōzen-ji, with Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s print of c. 1845; the kasha and the funeral customs of Tōhoku. The stories are told as they were written down. Voices: ElevenLabs. Animation, score and sound design are original.

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