Kasha (Nara)

Kasha is a yokai that snatches the corpse from a funeral procession; it appears as a cat-form yokai or as a fiery cart of the Buddhist hells. It is said to bear the body of one who lived in great wickedness to the hells, or to suck a coffin into the sky in a sudden thunderstorm. The figure carries a Buddhist lineage of the chariot-of-fire from the hells alongside a folkloric lineage of the aged cat that becomes a yokai. The canonical narrative places it at a funeral or graveyard, where a sudden black-cloud storm rises and the body is drawn up out of the coffin; in cat-form tellings, the household cat grown old enlarges and steals the body. Folk apotropaic practices include placing a razor or a branch of nanten on top of the coffin. The Buddhist Ojo Yoshu of Genshin (985) carries the chariot-of-fire imagery; medieval hell-screen paintings transmit the figure; in the early-modern period Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo, "in" volume (1776), figures the cat-form kasha; the Ehon Hyakumonogatari (1841) also includes it. Yanagita Kunio's folk-studies treat kasha-avoidance practice; Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) and the Nichibunken database systematize the figure. Adjacent cat yokai include bake-neko and nekomata; adjacent Buddhist hell-figures include kokujo and oni. The Buddhist chariot-of-fire image predominates in Nara and the Kinai region.