The exhausted, hungry, and lustful samurai help themselves first to the women’s food and water and then to the women. By the time their appetites are sated, Shige and Yone lie dead; the pillaging samurai leave their battered corpses sprawled as they fell, set fire to the house, and fade back into the sheltering bamboo. When the sun rises the following morning, the house has been reduced to blackened spikes of wood and a carpet of ash. But the women’s bodies are strangely intact, and a black cat delicately picks its way through the ruins to lick their still bleeding wounds. This is where grim realism yields to a dark magic the most rigorously rational mind is at a loss to banish.
Western folklore regularly puts cats in general, and black cats in particular, in league with witches and other dark forces, but
Japanese folktales are more ambiguous, starting with the fact that, while all felines are suspected of being more than handy mousers and cute house pets, they allow for two kinds of supernatural cats, the manekineko and the bakeneko. Anyone who has eaten in a Japanese restaurant knows what a manekineko looks like: perched somewhere near the cash register, it sits with one paw raised in greeting and the other resting on a coin, benevolently beckoning good fortune to come on in and stay awhile—Hello, Hello Kitty! The bakeneko, by contrast, is kissing cousin to the shape-shifting fox (kitsune) and the sly, mischievous tanuki (a small, scruffily kawaii canid native to East Asia): none are inherently evil, but all are capable of using their supernatural knack for mimicking other creatures—including human beings—to stir up trouble. That said, the fact that bakeneko often eat the person whose form they’ve taken suggests they’re less amusing and more alarming than their fellow shapeshifters, and the shadow of feline malevolence lurks in Kuroneko’s fog-swirled gloom.
