Kasha and the "Fire Cart": How a Cart from Hell Became a Corpse-Stealing Cat

In Japanese, when money is tight, people say their household is "hi no kuruma" — "on the fire cart." That everyday phrase and the yokai called the kasha come from the very same place: a burning cart in Buddhist belief that carries sinners off to hell. Over time, that cart came to be told of as a cat-like yokai that snatches the dead from funeral processions. Let's follow both paths, the word and the yokai.

The "fire cart" was first a ride to hell

In Buddhist thought, when a person who has done many evil deeds in life is dying, something comes up from hell to collect them. The vehicle that carries the sinner away is a cart wrapped in flames, the kasha (written with the characters for "fire" and "cart"). In some tellings, it is pulled by the demons of hell.

The suffering of being loaded onto that cart is said to be where the modern phrase comes from: "hi no kuruma" came to describe the misery of scrambling to make ends meet. So behind a casual comment about money troubles, a cart from hell is still rolling along.

Why a cat?

The kasha began as a cart, yet as a yokai it is most often told of as a cat. In many places, people said it was an old cat that had turned strange, or that a nekomata, the fork-tailed cat, becomes a kasha.

Part of the background is a set of old beliefs about cats and the dead. Keep cats away from a body before the funeral; if a cat steps over the dead, the body may start to move. Sayings like these were widely known, and they suggest that cats were thought to hold some strange power over the dead. When that idea met the image of a fiery cart that takes sinners away, it is thought, the corpse-stealing cat yokai was born.

The Edo-period artist Toriyama Sekien also painted the kasha, and his picture is known for showing a cat-like creature amid the flames. Stories of the ordinary bakeneko, the shapeshifting cat, usually unfold inside the home or close to daily life. Kasha stories, by contrast, always take place at funerals and graveyards. That is the clearest difference between the kasha and other cat yokai.

Guarding the dead

The kasha is said to appear while a funeral procession is on its way, or on the road to the grave. The sky suddenly darkens, wind and thunder rise, and the body is snatched from its coffin.

So people also passed down ways to protect the dead: laying a blade on top of the coffin to ward off evil, or having a priest chant sutras and use the power of his prayers to drive the kasha away. Behind these customs lies a simple wish: to see the departed safely on their way.

Nekodanka: the cat that saved a temple

The kasha also shows up in a rather surprising folktale, known as "Nekodanka," roughly "the cat and the temple's patrons." The story goes something like this.

The priest of a poor temple had cared for a cat for many years. One day, at the funeral of the village's richest man, the coffin suddenly rose into the air and would not come down. Priest after priest chanted sutras, with no result. But when the priest of the poor temple chanted, the coffin floated gently back to the ground. It was all the cat's doing, a way of repaying its master's kindness. After that, the priest's reputation grew, more families became patrons of his temple, and it prospered.

Here, the fearsome corpse thief becomes a cat that helps the person who cared for it. Perhaps having both sides, the frightening and the kind, is what makes a cat yokai so very cat-like. You'll find the kasha's look and legend on its Yokaipedia page.