This version reconstructs the Gotoku-neko based on Toriyama Sekien’s original image and earlier iconography. An aged cat with a forked tail wears a trivet like a crown and lingers at the hearth’s edge. In Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, Sekien plays with the boundary between tool-spirits and animal-spirits, citing Tsurezuregusa’s “Crowned Trivet” and offering a punning interpretation. Thus the Gotoku-neko is not merely a monster cat but a symbolic being linking utensils and literary sources. The Muromachi-period Night Parade scrolls show a yokai bearing a trivet among figures balancing tools on their heads; Sekien follows that lineage while giving it a feline form. The postwar notion that it “kindles fire by itself” derives from later guesses about the depicted blowpipe; older records do not specify such acts. Accordingly, in this version it is restrainedly treated as an apparition seen by the hearth, attended by the presence of fire.
Character Profile
This section is our own creative profile for storytelling. It is not historical fact or scholarship.
Yokai Type - Traditional Yokai
Category - Animal Shapeshifters
Rarity - Rare
Personality - taciturn, enigmatic
Compatibility - often sighted in places associated with fire and household utensils
Abilities - said to bear a forked tail as a long-lived catappears at the hearth accompanied by a sense of firemanifests unexpectedly as a symbolic being bound to household utensils
Weaknesses - details unknown, sometimes said to dislike loud noises and strong light like ordinary cats
Habitat - rooms with an irori hearth, old kitchens, barns and earthen-floored rooms
