Nekomata

◆ The legend

When a cat has lived for many, many years, its tail is said to split in two from the root, and the cat becomes a nekomata. It may walk on its hind legs, speak in human words, or take human form, but its surest sign is always the tail. To tell a nekomata from an ordinary cat, the saying goes, just look at it from behind.

Old beliefs about cats and the dead are often tied to the nekomata too. In many places people said a cat should be kept away from a body before the funeral, and that if a cat stepped over the dead, the body might start to move. Such sayings show how the strange powers of an aging cat were once feared. The nekomata is often hard to separate from the bakeneko, the shapeshifting cat, and that forked tail is what marks it as a nekomata.