A long time ago in a village in Japan there lived a poor farmer and his wife, who had a great many children. The youngest was a small boy, very clever and very quiet. He could not work in the fields the way his brothers and sisters could, so his parents — kindly people who saw what their child was — apprenticed him to the priest at the village temple, hoping he might learn to read sutras and grow into a useful man.

The priest was patient. The boy was patient. But the boy had one strange habit. He drew cats. Not on paper, because there was little paper in the temple. On the doors. On the screens. On the wooden columns. On the rice-paper of the lanterns. He drew cats sleeping, cats stretching, cats watching things you could not see. He drew cats so often that the priest, after several gentle warnings, told him: you must stop, or you must leave.

The boy did not stop. He could not. So he packed his few things, bowed to the priest, and set off in the late afternoon to walk to another, larger temple two days away.

The road was long, and night was beginning to fall when the boy came to a temple he did not know. The screens were broken. The wooden columns were scratched and gnawed. There was no priest. There were no lights. But there were still walls — and many of them, smooth and white in the moonlight, perfect for drawing.

The boy went inside. He took out his brush. He drew cats. He drew them on every white screen in the great hall — small cats curled in corners, large cats with wide patient eyes, cats stretched along the beams. He drew until his hand was tired and the moon was high. Then, remembering at last that he had walked all day, he looked for somewhere to sleep.

There was a small cabinet in the corner, just large enough for a small boy. He climbed inside, closed the door, and slept.

In the dark of the night, the temple was filled with a terrible sound. There were shrieks. There was scratching. There was something running, and something else running after it, and a long high cry that the boy did not want to understand. He stayed in his cabinet. He held very still.

In the morning, when the temple was quiet, the boy crept out. On the floor of the great hall lay an enormous goblin-rat, larger than a man, dead. Around the hall, on every screen and every column, sat the cats the boy had drawn the night before — their mouths and their paws marked with blood.

The boy went home. He showed the village what had happened. He grew up to be a famous artist, and his cats, the story says, are sold in shops in Kyoto to this day.

A note from the archive

Lafcadio Hearn published this English version in Japanese Fairy Tales (1898). His source was a small kibyōshi-style picture book purchased in Matsue, where Hearn had been teaching English. The tale is widely told in central Honshū with regional variations. In some versions the temple is fully abandoned; in others the priest of the second temple has been killed by the rat and is found by the boy in the morning.

The ATU classification is 178 — “the faithful animal” — though the variant here is unusual in that the rescuing animal is a drawing of an animal, not an actual one. Scholars (Mayer, The Yanagita Kunio Guide, 1986) read this as a syncretic blend of the ATU 178 tale-type with the older Japanese tradition of tsukumogami — the belief that objects, when long-loved and well-made, can develop their own animating spirit and act on the maker’s behalf.

The closing aside about famous Kyoto cats is Hearn’s; the village tradition doesn’t include it. We’ve kept it because it’s charming, and because Hearn’s footnote suggests his neighbor’s grandmother insisted on adding it whenever she told the story.

Performance note: read the night-scene slowly. Pause after each line. Let the cabinet sit in the dark for as long as your child can bear.

— Adapted from Lafcadio Hearn, Japanese Fairy Tales, T. Hasegawa, Tokyo, 1898.