SUPERSTITIONS
every reader of Japanese literature. Crimes which, under less romantic circumstances, would be ascribed to very vulgar passions, are laid to the cat's charge. Old age develops its evil propensities. When time has rendered it gaunt and grisly, it becomes a neko-mata, or cat-imp. Its agency is detected in weird lights that dance above the floor, darting out of reach when pursued; in the spinning of untouched wheels; in the turning of beds during their inmates' sleep. Then, perhaps, the old cat is detected sitting on its hind-legs with its head wrapped in the towel of the person it intends to bewitch, and if it is killed at the right moment, it is found to have two tails and a body five feet long.
Among people so profoundly convinced of the truth of animistic philosophy and at the same time so keenly appreciative of the beauties of nature, it was inevitable that the most graceful or brilliant objects in the world of foliage and flowers should be invested with spirit attributes. The spirit of a tree is called Kodama. The Yenoki (Celtis sinensis), which grows to an immense size and shows strange gnarling of trunk and distortion of branch, is a frequent object of this superstition. In Itabashi, a suburb of Tōkyō, there stands a tree called the "love-severing Yenoki" (Yenkiri Yenoki), which has the property of separating all lovers that come within its shadow. In the seventeenth century, when Princess Iso travelled from Kyōtō to Yedo to be the Shōgun's
205
