I Am a Cat
Sōseki Natsume
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
TFW you look back at your goodreads updates for this book and realize you started reading it at the end of March and didn’t finish till mid-May. For a 470-page book, that is mildly embarrassing, but I do have reasons for the delay, which we’ll get into in a bit. Anyway, this was a (mostly) lovely read, though in full transparency I swear I’m half a meltdown away from marching down to the afterlife to find Natsume-senpai and demand satisfaction because that final paragraph did me so dirty.
I Am a Cat is nothing more nor less than the diary of a bored Japanese cat in the late Meiji era. Begrudgingly adopted as a kitten (though “adopted” might be a generous term) by Mr. Sneaze, a dyspeptic middle school English teacher, the unnamed cat is good for very little – he’s never even caught a mouse, and shows little interest in trying – and is mostly concerned with finding warm, comfortable places to sleep. In addition to his mercurial master, the cat is acquainted with Sneaze’s wife and their three young daughters, Tonko, Sunko, and the despotic Baby Dear, a tyrannical three-year-old who according to the cat still breastfeeds (???) and is in the habit of roaring “BABU” whenever anybody disagrees with her even by a hair. Nobody knows what this means, least of all the child’s own family, which of course makes it terrifying.
The Sneazes are relatively low-income and seem to be perpetually short of household money, but they still have just enough to afford a servant, the ill-tempered O-san, who handles most of the cat’s care (by which I mean she feeds him fairly regularly and spends the rest of the time cursing him). Outside of the house, the cat has a passing acquaintance with other cats in the neighborhood, particularly Rickshaw Blacky; he also has a crush on the dainty Tortoiseshell, though he is later blamed for the disease that carries her over the rainbow bridge. However, these relationships are fleeting at best, and the cat’s main occupation lies in his amused and rather malicious observations of the Sneazes and their coterie of frankly bizarre and somewhat overeducated middle-class friends: Waverhouse, who suffers from a pretty serious case of verbal diarrhea; Avalon Coldmoon, a university student who obsesses over useless and incomprehensible subjects; and Suzuki, a conniving businessman with secret motives.
Though the cat’s day-to-day observations tend towards the random, many of his diary entries are connected by a handful of common threads, the most prominent of which is Sneaze’s antagonistic relationship with the obscenely wealthy Goldfield family. After barging into Sneaze’s house one random day to demand information about Coldmoon, who she believes is courting her daughter, Mrs. Goldfield (referred to as “Madam Conk” by the cat) takes grave offense at the overwhelming lack of manners displayed by Sneaze and Waverhouse and storms home. Her entire household declares war on Sneaze; her servants dub him “terra-cotta badger” owing to an apparent resemblance to the classic tanuki statues and stand outside his house to shout bewildering insults at him, while her husband enlists Suzuki as a double agent to manipulate Sneaze. Meanwhile, the daughter views Coldmoon with a haughty contempt that is mistaken for attraction, but the entire affair – if it really qualifies as such – comes to a rather desultory end when Coldmoon abruptly marries another girl and seems to take no strong opinion on the matter of his former sweetheart’s other suitors.
Sneaze has, of course, other enemies than Madam Conk; the cat reckons him a peculiar man, awkward and abrupt to the point of rudeness and also not particularly bright despite his scholastic background, and he tends to rub people the wrong way. He also possesses a towering ego and a self-consciously literate sense of humor that doesn’t make sense to anyone but himself, and all in all people don’t like him much. Naturally none of this is actually apparent to Sneaze, and the cat watches with languid scorn as he composes an extraordinarily tasteless eulogy, fakes a stomachache to get out of taking his wife to the theater, sleeps through a burglary, and wages ineffectual war against the baseball-playing boys who attend the school behind his house. (The boys win.) As for the cat, his relationship with Sneaze goes up and down: Sneaze was the one who approved the cat’s presence in the house and generally doesn’t bother him much, but he is not an affectionate master, though he does occasionally like to sit with the cat on his lap. All such sittings come to an end when the cat, depressed after an evening with Sneaze and his friends takes a nihilistic turn, tries beer for the first time and becomes so inebriated that he falls into an open jar of water and drowns. In his final moments, he realizes the futility of his struggles – both to escape the jar and in his general life – and gratefully accepts the painlessness of death.
This is why I need to make Natsume’s ghost pay for my therapy, and it is also part of the reason the book got four stars. The thing is, I knew that ending was coming. I knew the cat was going to die because it was discussed in the introduction (hoo boy, was it ever a mistake to read that intro) and I was curious about how the story was going to handle its own narrator’s death – whether the story was going to die with the cat, or whether it would be narrated by a human character finding the cat’s body the next day – but I was not prepared for the anguish of the final paragraph.
Gradually I begin to feel at ease. I can no longer tell whether I’m suffering or feeling grateful. It isn’t even clear whether I’m drowning in water or lolling in some comfy room. And it really doesn’t matter. It does not matter where I am or what I’m doing. I simply feel increasingly at ease. No, I can’t actually say that I feel at ease, either. I feel that I’ve cut away the sun and moon, they pull at me no longer; I’ve pulverized both Heaven and Earth, and I’m drifting off and away into some unknown endlessness of peace. I am dying, Egypt, dying. Through death I’m drifting slowly into peace. Only by dying can this divine quiescence be attained. May one rest in peace! I am thankful, I am thankful. Thankful, thankful, thankful.
One moment of me being absolutely bitter and petty: Of course Sneaze’s cat quotes Shakespeare in his dying moments. Of course he does. If Sneaze doesn’t do the same on his own deathbed, I’ll eat my cat.
Anyway, to get back to what I was saying: I get it. Natsume was bored, he got tired of people badgering him for more cat stories when maybe he wanted to write something else, he pulled a Conan Doyle only it actually worked and he didn’t have to bring his hero back at the audience’s overwhelming demand. (Apparently Londoners wore black armbands after Holmes’s death, because Sherlock fans have always been crazy. I suppose it would be hard not to capitulate to that kind of pressure.) But this final paragraph was so painful to read, and it doesn’t hurt any less seeing it again. Maybe this is just because I came to the book as a cat mother, and as a newly minted, card-carrying crazy cat lady. Even so, I find it hard to imagine taking the ending any less personally, even if I didn’t have a cat. And yet in a way it suits, because I was expecting a goofy, affectionate book about a bored cat but instead got 470 pages of philosophical satire that was depressing at its worst and darkly hilarious at its best. In that context, the death doesn’t actually feel out of place, though I resent it just the same. (My primary thought: HOW CAN THESE STUPID PEOPLE NOT NOTICE THEIR CAT DROWNING IN A JAR?)
The death of the cat alone might have taken half a star; the rest came off because the constant tense-switching drove me bananas. The cat switches between past and present tense even more frequently than Richard Osman, which is really saying something. Maybe this is a translation thing. I don’t read Japanese, so I can’t read the original text, nor say how I would have translated it. But I wish more care had been taken, because there doesn’t seem to be any purpose to the abrupt changes in tense. It is also exceedingly difficult to follow the rarefied dialogue between Sneaze and his dweeby intellectual friends, though obviously this is the point. 470 pages normally doesn’t seem long to me, but this book is so painstakingly dense that each 30ish-page chapter took me, on average, an hour to get through. Even skimming the paragraphs-long discourse didn’t help much. What I lived for were the more prosaic exchanges between Sneaze and his wife, or Sneaze and Madam Conk, or even just the cat’s little solo excursions. The humans were a little hard to take, but the cat’s narration was so savagely funny, particularly during the baseball chapter, that it kept me going.
Yet for all his snarky wit, the cat is still a cat, and he behaves like one. He refers to himself with the lofty pronoun “wagahai,” an honorific that was somewhat archaic even at the time the book was written. He notices that his master’s friends have begun to draw little cats on their letters to Sneaze and begins to think of himself as a local celebrity, the main draw of the Sneaze household; he steals food as compensation for his fame, but gravely miscalculates his ability to eat an unattended mochi and almost chokes when it gets stuck in his mouth. Though his observations grow progressively human-like as the book goes on, I never doubted that I was, in fact, being lectured by a cat.
My advice for future readers: This was a difficult read and I won’t pretend otherwise, but power through. While the humor is on the darker, quieter side, it is at times so side-splittingly funny that I’m pretty sure my cat thought I was having a seizure. Natsume-senpai’s cat may not have a name, and he may not be an accomplished hunter or mochi-eater or scholar, but I promise he’ll make it worth your while, for a little while. May he rest in peace.
