The kasha (火車, “fire cart”) is a Japanese yōkai said to steal corpses, now generally imagined in cat form. It was originally neither beast nor man but a fiery vehicle that carried the sinful to Buddhist hell. In the sixteenth century it was drawn as a demon — a warden of hell, or the thunder god Raijin — and, conflated with legends of a devil-cat that stole cadavers, it hardened into a cat-like yōkai by the late seventeenth century; Toriyama Sekien illustrated it as a cat.
The kasha is often said to appear with dark clouds, thunderclaps and storms. As a being that snatches the dead from funerals or graveyards, people sought to guard the deceased with amulets and chanting. Its true identity is told to be an ancient cat, a nekomata. A thing that refuses to leave the dead be and carries them off again meets our world’s dread — the end and its rest left unsealed.