Yokai Cats Vol. 1

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If you’re curious about yokai and want to experience them in real life, the best places for you to go would be to shrines, forests, and festivals whilst visiting Japan. There’s also an interesting Yokai art museum in Shodoshima island. This legendary yokai is said to have one of the most bone-chilling cries, and it will usually appear during the dead of the night. Once you hear its shrill cries, you known that disaster is coming. Similar to the Akaname yokai, the Ashiarai Yashiki is a monster that goes after those with hygiene problems! As a manga translator, Davisson was nominated for the 2014 Japanese-US Friendship Commission Translation Prize for his translation of the multiple Eisner Award-winning SHOWA: A HISTORY OF JAPAN. Other acclaimed translations include Satoshi Kon’s OPUS and THE ART OF SATOSHI KON, Mamoru Oshii’s SERAPHIM: 266613336 WINGS, Leiji Matsumoto’s QUEEN EMERALDAS, Kazuhiro Fujita’s THE GHOST AND THE LADY, Go Nagai’s CUTIE HONEY, and Gou Tanabe’s Eisner Award-nominated HP LOVECRAFT’S THE HOUND AND OTHER TALES.

In the Edo period (1603–1867), there was a folk belief that cats with long tails like snakes could bewitch people. Cats with long tails were disliked, and there was a custom of cutting their tails. It is speculated that this is the reason that there are so many cats in Japan with short tails now, natural selection having favored those with short tails. [18] This almost-human-looking yokai is perhaps the most pleasant and harmless of all yokai. He is often depicted as an old man with a large, elongated head, wearing Japanese robes.

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Around the same time, Kyoto was suffering from a plague called Nekomata Disease (猫股病) that the people believed was caused by the Nekomata, a curse of sorts. (Actually, it was rabies and there’s a theory that it wasn’t humans but dogs that suffered from it.) One person who assisted in the widespread popularity of yokai during the Edo period was Toriyama Sekien, a printmaker who became known as the father of the very first definitive encyclopedia of yokai monsters to ever exist. After that, the tale was widely circulated in society in the kōdan Saga no Yozakura ( 桜』) and the historical record book Saga Kaibyōden ( 伝). In the kōdan (a style of traditional oral Japanese storytelling), because Ryūzōji's widow told of her sorrow to the cat, it became a bakeneko, and killed and ate Komori Hanzaemon's mother and wife. It then shapeshifted and appeared in their forms, and cast a curse upon the family. In the historical record book, this was completely unrelated to the Ryūzōji event, however, and a foreign type of cat, which had been abused by Nabeshima's feudal lord Komori Handayū, sought revenge and killed and ate the lord's favorite concubine, shapeshifted into her form, and caused harm to the family. It was Itō Sōda who exterminated it. [24] Other powers of the mythical Bakeneko include summoning fireballs, using their tails as torches to set fires, controlling the dead, and cursing (or killing) their previous owners, if they see fit.

It's also not clear where some of the excerpts come from (particularly those that start the chapters) and it's my impression they may be the author's invention -- which can be fine to get the right sense across to the reader and introduce an idea, but since this book is specifically about Japanese folklore (and presenting as an authority on Kaibyo), I wish it was made clear whether anything was created, and if so: what was original; how much was derived but written in the author's own words; and why it was included as it was. Without that clarity, there is some danger in how these bits might be interpreted by readers present and future (i.e., as specific examples of Japanese folklore when they may more accurately be interpretive representations or suggestions of it).

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