Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), the author of this unusual book, has been an object of interest since I listened to Kokoro, and went memorabilia-hunting in Kumamoto.

Like many Japanese publications, it has a complex history. Inspired by a real cat who took up residence in the Soseki household, it is the author's first novel. But it started life as a short story, appearing in the January 1905 issue of Hototogisu. While Soseki might have envisaged a one-hit wonder, readers wanted more. So new instalments followed on regularly, with the final one appearing in August 1906. In book form, Volume 1 came out in mid-October 1905, and the first printing flew off the shelves in a mere 20 days. Volume 2 followed in November 1906, and Volume 3 in May 1907.

The Soseki Project warns: "Many of Soseki's works are available in English translation, but it is recommended that these translations be avoided. This advice is not meant as a criticism of the translators, but rather reflects the view that much of the flavor and character of the original text is inevitably lost when translating Japanese literature into English." I'm sure this is true. In fact, it's apparent even from the title. Whereas "I am a cat" is a neutral statement, the Japanese equivalent, wagahai wa neko de aru, uses the kind of high-register phrasing appropriate to the upper levels of society. This irony just doesn't come across in English. (I think the English title should have been My Majesty the Cat...)

Anyway, I read no Japanese, so a translation it has to be. Mine is by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, which came out originally as three volumes (published 1972, 1979, and 1986). It certainly reads beautifully, and I was interested to see it in the bookshops at Singapore's Changi Airport as we were passing through recently.


Kisanuki Hiroshi's cat, Ibusuki, 2022

The plot is very simple. We watch, through the eyes of a supercilious and wittily disparaging cat, the struggles and small joys of a Japanese family. There's Sneaze, a schoolteacher, who comes complete with a long-suffering wife, three daughters, and various household staff. Then there's the "cast of eccentrics who haunt my master's house". Among these, we have Waverhouse, aesthete and joker par excellence; Coldmoon, a physics scholar; Beauchamp Blowlamp (Beauchamp pronounced Bochamp and on no account Beecham), a "new-style" poet; and Singleman Kidd (a philosopher). All are more than a little ridiculous. And finally we have various neighbours, and walk-on characters such as the burglar (whose most valuable piece of booty is a box of yams).

John Nathan, the author's biographer, describes the book as "a mordantly comic evocation of Soseki’s deep pessimism about his own humanity and indeed about humankind in general... The cat speaks with Soseki's voice, now bitingly critical, now cynically amused". Stylistically, it's a rip-roaring medley of elements, including "classical Chinese, classical Japanese, contemporary vernacular across a range of timbres from bourgeois refinement to 'downtown' vulgarity, and a vast field of allusion to Western sources from the Greeks to 18th- and 19th-century English literature".


Japanese cats, 2022/23

I Am a Cat is a highly satirical piece, and -- as I've admitted before -- I'm more comfortable with satire in short bursts. Nevertheless, it's well worth reading.

It's very funny, for a start. A lot of the comedy, of course, derives from our cat's-eye perspective. Examples, first, of what it's like to be a cat (and you can't help thinking here of Montaigne, and his imaginative effort to think through the eyes of another species):

-- There's a very amusing scene where the cat attempts to eat a mochi (it's translated rice-cake, but it seems clear it has that sticky mochi consistency, as he gets his teeth irretrievably embedded): "Too late I realize," he says, "that the rice-cake is a fiend." He ends up trying to use his front paws to extricate himself, all the while dancing round on his back paws. The humans find this very funny, and it's Sneaze who eventually rescues him.
-- His feline friend Tortoiseshell dies, and is given a very respectable send-off by her humans (who are most upset when the doctor refers to the cat as "it", and a bit concerned about the brevity of the funeral service, until the priest assures them that he had done "quite enough to get a kitty into Paradise").
-- The cat at one point feels it's time to be "worshiping my honored Great Tail Gracious Deity" -- and ends up, predictably, chasing said tail.
-- I liked this Buzz Lightyear-reminiscent quip: "Though there may seem to be a substantial difference between descending and free falling, it isn’t as great as one might fondly imagine."
-- And this: "Pines secrete an extremely sticky resin which, once it has gummed the ends of my fur together, cannot be loosened even if struck by lightning, or fired upon by the whole Russian Baltic Fleet. What’s more, as soon as five hairs stick together, then ten, then thirty hairs get inextricably stuck."
-- And of course our dreams always betray our real ambitions: "There came an afternoon when, taking my usual snooze on the veranda, I dreamt I was a tiger. 'Bring me,' I growl at my master, 'buckets brimming with chicken meat,' which he, crawling toward me in a pleasing tremble of terror, immediately supplied."
-- The cat at one point decides that, in order to blend in properly, as a "normal" cat, he must catch a rat. The results aren't good: "Never have I seen such impudent bravado combined with such poltroonery! Their skittering evasion of fair fight brands them unworthy adversaries for a gentleman... I had launched upon this venture with high courage, a determination to subdue the foe, and even a certain elevated sense of the spiritual beauty of my undertaking, but now, tired out and downright sleepy, I find it merely fatuous and irksome."



But there's also plenty of humour in the passages that spear our human foibles:

-- "No doubt human beings like my two-faced master find it necessary to keep diaries in order to display in a darkened room that true character so assiduously hidden from the world. But among cats both our four main occupations (walking, standing, sitting, and lying down) and such incidental activities as excreting waste are pursued quite openly. We live our diaries, and consequently have no need to keep a daily record as a means of maintaining our real characters. Had I the time to keep a diary, I’d use that time to better effect; sleeping on the veranda."
-- "In my opinion, there is nothing more unbecoming in the human type than its indecent habit of sleeping with the mouth left open. Never in a lifetime would a cat be caught in such degenerate conduct."
-- "Why ... [do humans] use two legs when they all have four available? Such waste of natural resources! If they used four legs to get about, they’d all be a great deal nippier; nevertheless, they persist in the folly of using only two and leave the other pair just hanging from their shoulders like a couple of dried codfish that someone brought around as a present."

Some of the passages can't fail to touch the heart of any cat-lover: "Cat’s paws are as if they do not exist. Wheresoever they may go, they never make clumsy noises. Cats walk as if on air, as if they trod the clouds, as quietly as a stone going light-tapped under water, as an ancient Chinese harp touched in a sunken cave. The walking of a cat is the instinctive realization of all that is most delicate."

And there's a lovely section that anticipates the feline-obsessed internet by a good long stretch. The cat is very pleased one day to find himself appearing on a postcard sent to his master by a painter friend. Later another cat-oriented missive arrives at the house: "[Sneaze] looked puzzled and said to himself, 'Can this be a Year of the Cat?' He just doesn’t seem to have grasped that these postcards are manifestations of my growing fame." Then there's another one. No picture this time, but the message adds, "Please be so kind as to give my best regards to the cat." Later still, a friend drops by, and asks, "Ah! Is that THE cat?"

Other superb cameos include:

-- the arrival of the burglar, and the cat's inability to rouse his master;
-- the scene at the bathhouse (when the bath is accidentally overheated, and the bathers scramble to climb out: "Horribly hairy legs and horrible hairless things are juxtaposed and tangled in a horrible squirm to escape");
-- the children at table (all details appropriately revolting);
-- the men in conversation (interrupting each other, going off at tangents, mocking each other).


Soseki recollections in Kumamoto, 2022

But there's a lot of sadness in the book, too. The cat's master (and we are told this is Soseki's self-parody) comes across as an unfulfilled and somewhat tragic character. He is kind (he's the one we mostly see being affectionate towards the cat). But he doesn't like his job much, and is regularly disrespected by the students: "Though teachers are not actually kept on chains, they are very effectively shackled by their salaries. They can be teased in perfect safety. They won’t resign or use their teeth on their pupils. Had they sufficient spunk to resign, they would not originally have allowed themselves to sink into the slavery of teaching." Sneaze is hypochondriac, inconsistent, and "oyster-like". He's indolent; he's unimaginative. And he mocks his wife mercilessly -- for her lack of English, for her incipient baldness, for her dumpiness. The family often seems short of money, but Sneaze continues to spend liberally on books (his wife complains he never reads them, and it's the cat's view that "for my master a book is not a thing to be read, but a device to bring on slumber: a typographical sleeping-pill, a paginated security-blanket"). Sneaze lives his life in a kind of bewilderment, and the cat tells us he ends each day "with an admission that he just doesn’t understand anything any more".

The reasons for that incomprehension connect the book with themes that will re-emerge in Kokoro. Soseki was unhappy and conflicted about the rapidity of the changes under way in Japan during his era, which had not only brought about clashes between individual and collective values, but had also prepared the ground for much hypocrisy and vacuity.

Underlying this dis-ease is the fear that much of what passes for future-proofing emulation of the West is just blind imitation. As the cat says, on the subject of physical well-being: "It is only recently that, like some infectious disease brought from the West to this pure land of the gods, a stream of silly injunctions has been sprayed upon us to take exercise, to gulp milk, to shower ourselves with freezing water, to plonk ourselves in the sea, and, in the summertime, to sequester ourselves in the mountains on a diet, allegedly healthy, of nothing more solid than mist. Such importations seem to me about as salubrious as the black plague, tuberculosis, and that very Western malady, neurasthenia." He continues: "Europeans are powerful, so it matters not how ridiculous or daft their goings on, everyone must imitate even their daftest designs."

Sneaze, says the cat, habitually "values whatever he does not understand", and the ridiculously irrepressible Waverhouse asserts: "I know almost everything about almost everything. Perhaps the only thing I don’t know all about is the real extent of my own foolishness. But even on that, I can make a pretty good guess."



There's a cultural clash under way that may well be expressed in terms that are rather too essentialist for modern tastes, but must nonetheless have been highly disorienting and distressing for those who continually saw valuable babies being thrown out with discarded bathwater. According to philosopher Singleman: "The progressive positivism of Western civilization has certainly produced some notable results, but, in the end, it is no more than a civilization of the inherently dissatisfied, a culture for unhappy peoples. The traditional civilization of Japan does not look for satisfaction by some change in the condition of others but in that of the self. The main difference between the West and Japan is that the latter civilization has developed on the basic assumption that one’s external environment cannot be significantly changed... Nobody, however mighty, can do as he likes with the world. None can stop the sun from setting, none reverse the flow of rivers. But any man is able to do as he likes with his own mind." He continues: "In the old days, a man was taught to forget himself. Today it is quite different: he is taught not to forget himself and he accordingly spends his days and nights in endless self-regard."

Many of the bleak prospects the friends come up with towards the end of the book have an uncanny prophetic quality: A future rise in the number of suicides; a more violent and coercive police force; and the end of the institution of marriage...

According to Waverhouse: "Suddenly everything changed. We were all discovered to possess personalities, and every individual began to assert his newfound individuality... In the more backward parts of Japan, among the wilder mountains, you can still find entire families, including their lesser cousinage, all living together, perfectly contentedly, in one single house. That lifestyle was only viable because, apart from the head of the family, no member of the group possessed any individuality to assert; while any member who, exceptionally, happened to possess it, took good care never to let it show... In Europe, where the modernization of society has proceeded much further than has yet happened in Japan, this necessary disintegration of the multi-generation family unit has long been common."



And on top of all this, there's the problem of patriotism, because running along in the background is the war against Russia:

"'The Spirit of Japan,' cries Japanese man;
'Long may it live,' cries he
But his cry breaks off in that kind of cough
Which comes from the soul's T.B...

"None would be the men they are,
None would be a man
If he wasn't wrapped up like a tuppenny cup
In the Spirit of Japan...

"There’s not one man in the whole of Japan
Who has not used the phrase,
But I have not met one user yet
Who knows what it conveys.
The Spirit of Japan, the Japanese Spirit,
Could it conceivably be
Nothing but another of those long-nosed goblins
Only the mad can see?"

Waverhouse says his mother wrote him a letter, and "proceeded to list the names of my classmates at elementary school who had either died or had been wounded in the present war. As, one after another, I read those names, the world grew hollow, all human life quite futile... I felt very lonely. The end of the year, those deaths on the battlefield, senility, life’s insecurity, that time and tide wait for no man, and other thoughts of a similar nature ran around in my head. One often talks about hanging oneself."



Which brings us to the tragic end... Depressed by the latest conversation he has witnessed ("if one tapped the deep bottom of the hearts of these seemingly lighthearted people, it would give a somewhat sad sound"), by his recent discovery of "some German mog called Kater Murr" ("if such a feline culture-hero was already demonstrating superior cat skills so long as a century ago, perhaps a good-for-nothing specimen like me has already outlived its purpose and should no more delay its retirement into nothingness"), and by a strong recognition of mortality ("since there seems so little point in living, perhaps those who die young are the only creatures wise"), he decides to try some consolatory left-over beer.

Somewhat unsteady as a result, he falls into a big clay jar half-filled with water, and finds he can't escape... It's a heart-rending close (but again strangely reminiscent of Montaigne): "Since it’s blindingly clear that I can’t get out, it’s equally clear that it’s senseless to persist in my efforts to do so. Only my own senseless persistence is causing my ghastly suffering... Gradually I begin to feel at ease... I'm drifting off and away into some unknown endlessness of peace... 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."

Oh...

You've been riding along on this cat's wise-cracks for so many chapters that you definitely crash to the ground very painfully at this point. He, on the other hand, has indubitably gained immortality.

I'll close with Montaigne again, famous for his capacity to think himself into the experience of others: "When I play with my cat who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me? We mutually divert one another with our play. If I have my hour to begin or to refuse, she also has hers." If you doubt it, take a look at the sketch by Pieter van Veen in his own 1602 edition. I bet that cat had some acid things to say about human life...