Hi, Lovelies.
Today I want to talk about my all-time favorite Japanese fairytale. It’s called “The Boy Who Drew Cats” Now, if you know me, you know I love cats. In fact, I have two of my very own. They’re my babies. Dominic and Vivi, short for Vivian.
I first read this story in a comic book filled with fairytales from all over the world. I dropped the link to the comic book at the end of the post. And then, I heard it again while listening to the Myths and Legends podcast. Highly recommend that one if you like fairytales, myths, and legends.
Now, like all fairytales, there are multiple versions of them. That’s what happens when you have a story that is really old and started out being told by word of mouth. It’s like a really long game of telephone that spans generations. I will be telling you the one that I was told.
It goes like this.
There once was a young boy, who was the son of farmers. And what do you do when you’re a son of a farmer? You farm, just like your father before you. So, the boy’s father sent him out to the field to farm. Now, the boy was smart and clever, but he didn’t care about farming. He didn’t like it at all.
What did he like, you ask?
Cats.
He liked cats. And not just cats, he liked drawing cats. So that’s what he did. He drew cats in the fields that he was supposed to be farming. He drew big cats. He drew small cats. He drew fat cats, long cats, and every kind of cat in between.
His father came back to fields that weren’t plowed or planted, or whatever you do while farming. Instead, the fields were covered with drawings of cats in the dirt, stretching to every inch of the grounds.
His father knew that this couldn’t go on. Luckily, he knew a scholar. He pleaded for the scholar to take his son as a student. After asking the boy some questions and verifying that this was indeed a clever and smart boy, the scholar agreed.
The boy left his family to become a student to the scholar. The scholar gave him many scrolls to read, telling him to memorize them. As the scholar left him to study, the boy grew bored. He didn’t want to study these scrolls, instead he wanted to draw cats. So, he did. In the margins of the scrolls, the boy drew cats. He drew big cats, small cats, fat cats, long cats, and every sort of cat in between.
The scholar came back to find his ancient scrolls desecrated with cat drawings. This can’t go, he said to himself. Luckily, he knew a priest who was looking for a student. So, he sent the boy to the priest.
The priest gave the boy a small room to call his own and sat him down to copy the scriptures. The boy started to copy the scriptures down, but soon grew bored. With the ink that he was supposed to copy scriptures with, instead he began to draw cats on the paper. But soon, he ran out of paper, so he continued his drawings on the desk. Then, the desk grew full, so he continued on the walls. At the end of the day, the priest walked in, horrified to find every sort of cat looking back at him from the paper, the desk, and the walls.
This isn’t going to work, the priest thought to himself. But, he didn’t know anyone who would take the boy, so he told the boy that he would have to go back home. It was a long journey from the temple back to the boy’s home, so the priest reminded the boy to avoid large places at night, and keep to small ones.
The boy thought this was a strange warning, but nodded and started the journey back home. On his way home, he realized he couldn’t go home. His father was a farmer and he was not cut out for farming. Besides, it would be an embarrassment for him to come back after being kicked out by both the scholar and the priest. So the boy began to wander about.
Halfway through the journey, it began to rain. The boy hurried to find shelter and up ahead he saw a run down temple. Knocking on the door, he asked to be let in. Nobody answered, but the door wasn’t locked, so the boy just let himself in. Entering, he realized that the temple was abandoned and strangely had large scratches on the wall. As he waited for the rain to stop, he grew bored. And when the boy grew bored, he drew cats.
The temple was clearly abandoned anyway, so the boy started to draw cats on the flower, then all over the walls, until every surface was covered with cats. As the rain began to stop, the boy realized that it was night, he couldn’t go out anyways, he might as well stay in the abandoned temple.
But just when he was going to go to sleep, he remembered what the priest had warned him. “Avoid large places at night, and keep to small ones.” He was in the main entrance of the temple, a large empty place. Following the priest’s advice, the boy found a cupboard to crawl into and fell asleep inside with the door closed.
In the middle of the night, the boy woke up to horrifying sounds; loud scratching, blood-curdling howls, and the shaking of the whole temple. The boy curled up tighter in his cupboard, staying completely silent as he hoped it would all end soon. Eventually, the noise stopped, but the boy stayed in his cupboard until he saw rays of daylight come creeping him. He slowly opens the door to his cupboard, peeking out.
There, laying on the flower, was a huge dead demonic rat. The boy looked around. There was no one who had come in to kill the rat. So, who was it? As he continued to look at his drawings, he noticed something. The cats, the ones he drew last night, had blood dripping down their fangs.
The boy descended from the temple to the town below and heralded a hero. And as a hero, you can do whatever you want. And what did the boy want to do? He wanted to draw cats, so he did.
And this is the exact comic
The Boy Who Drew Cats – Luke Pearson – Illustration and Comics
