No. 27 — The cat who made a pilgrimage to Ise

A married couple kept a cat, borrowed from a family home, to watch the house while they were away. When they joked that the cat was useless, the cat secretly turned a millstone to show that it was hardworking. The cat asked to be allowed to make a pilgrimage to Ise, and completed the pilgrimage safely. On the way home, at a ruined temple, it fought and defeated the bewitching rats as large as oxen, but was wounded in the fight and died, and the villagers built a cat mound behind the temple and held services for it.

Source: Ogasawara Kenkichi (ed.), Shiwa-gun Mukashibanashi-shu (1938) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text)
Land: Shiwa District
Type: Yokai and the Uncanny, Death, Ghosts and Omens, Shape-Shifting Animals
Beings: cat, giant rat

This is an English rendering of our short Japanese summary of the source tale — a summary translated from the Japanese, not a translation of the original text. The summary was drafted and translated with AI assistance, and names and numbers were checked against our records. Tale numbers for this book follow the order in which the tales appear; they are ours, not the book's.