I Am a Cat Page 8

  “Yes indeed, madam. Even me, if I don’t eat for a whole day, I couldn’t work at all the next day.”

  The maid answers as though she recognized the cat as an animal superior to herself. Indeed, in this particular household the cat may well be more important than the maid.

  “Have you taken her to see a doctor?”

  “Yes, and the doctor was really strange. When I went into his consulting room carrying Tortoiseshell in my arms, he asked me if I’d caught a cold and tried to take my pulse. I said ‘No, Doctor, it is not I who am the patient, this is the patient,’ and I placed Tortoiseshell on my knees.

  The doctor grinned and said he had no knowledge of the sicknesses of cats, and that if I just left it, perhaps it would get better. Isn’t he too terrible? I was so angry that I told him,‘Then, please don’t bother to examine her, she happens to be our precious cat.’ And I snuggled Tortoiseshell back into the breast of my kimono and came straight home.”

  “Truly so.”

  “Truly so” is one of those elegant expressions that one would never hear in my house. One has to be the thirteenth Shogun’s widowed wife’s somebody’s something to be able to use such a phrase. I was much impressed by its refinement.

  “She seems to be sniffling. . .”

  “Yes, I’m sure she’s got a cold and a sore throat; whenever one has a cold, one suffers from an honorable cough.”

  As might be expected from the maid of the thirteenth Shogun’s somebody’s something, she’s quick with honorifics.

  “Besides, recently, there’s a thing they call consumption. . .”

  “Indeed these days one cannot be too careful. What with the increase in all these new diseases like tuberculosis and the black plague.”

  “Things that did not exist in the days of the Shogunate are all no good to anyone. So you be careful too!”

  “Is that so, madam?”

  The maid is much moved.

  “I don’t see how she could have caught a cold, she hardly ever went out. . .”

  “No, but you see she’s recently acquired a bad friend.”

  The maid is as highly elated as if she were telling a State secret.

  “A bad friend?”

  “Yes, that tatty-looking tom at the teacher’s house in the main street.”

  “D’you mean that teacher who makes rude noises every morning?”

  “Yes, the one who makes the sounds like a goose being strangled every time he washes his face.”

  The sound of a goose being strangled is a clever description. Every morning when my master gargles in the bathroom he has an odd habit of making a strange, unceremonious noise by tapping his throat with his toothbrush. When he is in a bad temper he croaks with a vengeance; when he is in a good temper, he gets so pepped up that he croaks even more vigorously. In short, whether he is in a good or a bad temper, he croaks continually and vigorously. According to his wife, until they moved to this house he never had the habit; but he’s done it every day since the day he first happened to do it. It is rather a trying habit. We cats cannot even imagine why he should persist in such behavior. Well, let that pass. But what a scathing remark that was about “a tatty-looking tom.” I continue to eavesdrop.

  “What good can he do making that noise! Under the Shogunate even a lackey or a sandal-carrier knew how to behave; and in a residential quarter there was no one who washed his face in such a manner.”

  “I’m sure there wasn’t, madam.”

  That maid is all too easily influenced, and she uses “madam” far too often.

  “With a master like that what’s to be expected from his cat? It can only be a stray. If he comes round here again, beat him.”

  “Most certainly I’ll beat him. It must be all his fault that Tortoiseshell’s so poorly. I’ll take it out on him, that I will.”

  How false these accusations laid against me! But judging it rash to approach too closely, I came home without seeing Tortoiseshell.

  When I return, my master is in the study meditating in the middle of writing something. If I told him what they say about him in the house of the two-stringed harp, he would be very angry; but, as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. There he sits, posing like a sacred poet, groaning.

  Just then,Waverhouse, who has expressly stated in his New Year letter that he would be too busy to call for some long time, dropped in.

  “Are you composing a new-style poem or something? Show it to me if it’s interesting.”

  “I considered it rather impressive prose, so I thought I’d translate it,” answers my master somewhat reluctantly.

  “Prose? Whose prose?”

  “Don’t know whose.”

  “I see, an anonymous author. Among anonymous works, there are indeed some extremely good ones. They are not to be slighted. Where did you find it?”

  “The Second Reader, ” answers my master with imperturbable calmness.

  “The Second Reader? What’s this got to do with the Second Reader?”

  “The connection is that the beautifully written article which I’m now translating appears in the Second Reader.”

  “Stop talking rubbish. I suppose this is your idea of a last minute squaring of accounts for the peacocks’ tongues?”

  “I’m not a braggart like you,” says my master and twists his mustache. He is perfectly composed.

  “Once when someone asked Sanyo whether he’d lately seen any fine pieces of prose, that celebrated scholar of the Chinese classics produced a dunning letter from a packhorse man and said,‘This is easily the finest piece of prose that has recently come to my attention.’ Which implies that your eye for the beautiful might, contrary to one’s expectations, actually be accurate. Read your piece aloud. I’ll review it for you,” says Waverhouse as if he were the originator of all aesthetic theories and practice. My master starts to read in the voice of a Zen priest, reading that injunction left by the Most Reverend Priest Daitō. “‘Giant Gravitation,’” he intoned.

  “What on earth is giant gravitation?”

  “‘Giant Gravitation’ is the title.”

  “An odd title. I don’t quite understand.”

  “The idea is that there’s a giant whose name is Gravitation.”

  “A somewhat unreasonable idea but, since it’s a title, I’ll let that pass.

  All right, carry on with the text. You have a good voice. Which makes it rather interesting.”

  “Right, but no more interruptions.” My master, having laid down his prior conditions, begins to read again.

  Kate looks out of the window. Children are playing ball. They throw the ball high up in the sky. The ball rises up and up. After a while the ball comes down. They throw it high again: twice, three times. Every time they throw it up, the ball comes down. Kate asks why it comes down instead of rising up and up. “It is because a giant lives in the earth,” replies her mother. “He is the Giant Gravitation. He is strong. He pulls everything toward him. He pulls the houses to the earth. If he didn’t they would fly away. Children, too, would fly away. You’ve seen the leaves fall, haven’t you? That’s because the Giant called them. Sometimes you drop a book. It’s because the Giant Gravitation asks for it. A ball goes up in the sky. The giant calls for it. Down it falls.

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, isn’t it good?”

  “All right, you win. I wasn’t expecting such a present in return for the moat-bells.”

  “It wasn’t meant as a return present, or anything like that. I translated it because I thought it was good. Don’t you think it’s good?” My master stares deep into the gold-rimmed spectacles.

  “What a surprise! To think that you of all people had this talent. . .

  Well, well! I’ve certainly been taken in right and proper this time. I take my hat off to you.” He is alone in his understanding. He’s talking to himself. The situation is quite beyond my master’s grasp.

  “I’ve no intention of making you doff your cap. I translated this text simply because I th
ought it was an interesting piece of writing.”

  “Indeed, yes! Most interesting! Quite as it should be! Smashing! I feel small.”

  “You don’t have to feel small. Since I recently gave up painting in watercolors, I’ve been thinking of trying my hand at writing.”

  “And compared with your watercolors, which showed no sense of perspective, no appreciation of differences in tone, your writings are superb. I am lost in admiration.”

  “Such encouraging words from you are making me positively enthusiastic about it,” says my master, speaking from under his continuing mis-apprehension.

  Just then Mr. Coldmoon enters with the usual greeting.

  “Why, hello,” responds Waverhouse, “I’ve just been listening to a terrifically fine article and the curtain has been rung down upon my moat-bells.” He speaks obliquely about something incomprehensible.

  “Have you really?” The reply is equally incomprehensible. It is only my master who seems not to be in any particularly light humor.

  “The other day,” he remarked, “a man called Beauchamp Blowlamp came to see me with an introduction from you.”

  “Ah, did he? Beauchamp’s an uncommonly honest person, but, as he is also somewhat odd, I was afraid that he might make himself a nuisance to you. However, since he had pressed me so hard to be introduced to you. . .”

  “Not especially a nuisance. . .”

  “Didn’t he, during his visit, go on at length about his name?”

  “No, I don’t recall him doing so.”

  “No? He’s got a habit at first meeting of expatiating upon the singularity of his name.”

  “What is the nature of that singularity?” butts in Waverhouse, who has been waiting for something to happen.

  “He gets terribly upset if someone pronounces Beauchamp as Beecham.”

  “Odd!” said Waverhouse, taking a pinch of tobacco from his gold-painted, leather tobacco pouch.

  “Invariably he makes the immediate point that his name is not Beecham Blowlamp but Bo-champ Blowlamp.”

  “That’s strange,” and Waverhouse inhales pricey tobacco-smoke deep into his stomach.

  “It comes entirely from his craze for literature. He likes the effect and is inexplicably proud of the fact that his personal name and his family name can be made to rhyme with each other. That’s why when one pronounces Beauchamp incorrectly, he grumbles that one does not appreciate what he is trying to get across.”

  “He certainly is extraordinary.” Getting more and more interested, Waverhouse hauls back the pipe smoke from the bottom of his stomach to let it loose at his nostrils. The smoke gets lost en route and seems to be snagged in his gullet. Transferring the pipe to his hand, he coughs chokingly.

  “When he was here the other day, he said he’d taken the part of a boatman at a meeting of his Reading Society, and that he’d gotten himself laughed at by a gaggle of schoolgirls,” says my master with a laugh.

  “Ah, that’s it, I remember.” Waverhouse taps his pipe upon his knees.

  This strikes me as likely to prove dangerous, so I move a little way farther off. “That Reading Society, now. The other day when I treated him to moat-bells, he mentioned it. He said they were going to make their second meeting a grand affair by inviting well-known literary men, and he cordially invited me to attend. When I asked him if they would again try another of Chikamatsu’s dramas of popular life, he said no and that they’d decided on a fairly modern play, The Golden Demon. I asked him what role he would take and he said, ‘I’m going to play O-miya.’

  Beauchamp as O-miya would certainly be worth seeing. I’m determined to attend the meeting in his support.”

  “It’s going to be interesting, I think,” says Coldmoon and he laughs in an odd way.

  “But he is so thoroughly sincere, which is good, and has no hint of frivolousness about him. Quite different from Waverhouse, for instance.” My master is revenged for Andrea del Sarto, for peacocks’ tongues, and for moat-bells all in one go. Waverhouse appears to take no notice of the remark.

  “Ah well, when all’s said and done, I’m nothing but a chopping board at Gyōtoku.”

  “Yes, that’s about it,” observes my master, although in fact he does not understand Waverhouse’s involved method of describing himself as a highly sophisticated simpleton. But not for nothing has he been so many years a schoolteacher. He is skilled in prevarication, and his long experience in the classrooms can be usefully applied at such awkward moments in his social life.

  “What is a chopping board at Gyōtoku?” asks the guileless Coldmoon.

  My master looks toward the alcove and pulverizes that chopping board at Gyōtoku by saying, “Those narcissi are lasting well. I bought them on my way home from the public baths toward the end of last year.”

  “Which reminds me,” says Waverhouse, twirling his pipe, “that at the end of last year I had a really most extraordinary experience.”

  “Tell us about it.” My master, confident that the chopping board is now safely back in Gyōtoku, heaves a sigh of relief. The extraordinary experience of Mr. Waverhouse fell thus upon our ears:

  “If I remember correctly, it was on the twenty-seventh of December.

  Beauchamp had said he would like to come and hear me talk upon matters literary, and had asked me to be sure to be in. Accordingly, I waited for him all the morning but he failed to turn up. I had lunch and was seated in front of the stove reading one of Pain’s humorous books, when a letter arrived from my mother in Shizuoka. She, like all old women, still thinks of me as a child. She gives me all sorts of advice; that I mustn’t go out at night when the weather’s cold; that unless the room is first well-heated by a stove, I’ll catch my death of cold every time I take a bath. We owe much to our parents. Who but a parent would think of me with such solicitude? Though normally I take things lightly and as they come, I confess that at that juncture the letter affected me deeply. For it struck me that to idle my life away, as indeed I do, was rather a waste. I felt that I must win honor for my family by producing a masterwork of literature or something like that. I felt I would like the name of Doctor Waverhouse to become renowned, that I should be acclaimed as a leading figure in Meiji literary circles, while my mother is still alive.

  Continuing my perusal of the letter, I read,‘You are indeed lucky. While our young people are suffering great hardships for the country in the war against Russia, you are living in happy-go-lucky idleness as if life were one long New Year’s party organized for your particular benefit!’

  Actually, I’m not as idle as my mother thinks. But she then 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.

  And she ended her letter by saying, ‘since I am getting old, perhaps this NewYear’s rice-cakes will be my last. . .’ You will understand that, as she wrote so very dishearteningly, I grew more and more depressed. I began to yearn for Beauchamp to come soon, but somehow he didn’t. And at last it was time for supper. I thought of writing in reply to my mother, and I actually wrote about a dozen lines. My mother’s letter was more than six feet long, but, unable myself to match such a prodigious performance, I usually excuse myself after writing some ten lines. As I had been sitting down for the whole of the day, my stomach felt strange and heavy. Thinking that if Beauchamp did turn up he could jolly well wait, I went out for a walk to post my letter. Instead of going toward Fujimicho, which is my usual course, I went, without my knowing it, out toward the third embankment. It was a little cloudy that evening and a dry wind was blowing across from the other side of the moat. It was terribly cold. A train coming from the direction of Kagurazaka passed with a whistle along the lower part of the bank. 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 tal
ks about hanging oneself.

  But I was beginning to think that one could be tempted to commit suicide just at such a time as this. It so happened that at that moment I raised my head slightly, and, as I looked up to the top of the bank, I found myself standing right below that very pine tree.”

  “That very pine tree? What’s that?” cuts in my master.

  “The pine for hanging heads,” says Waverhouse ducking his noddle.

  “Isn’t the pine for hanging heads that one at Ko-nodai?” Coldmoon amplifies the ripple.

  “The pine at Kōnodai is the pine for hanging temple bells. The pine at Dotesambanchō is the one for hanging heads. The reason why it has acquired this name is that an old legend says that anyone who finds himself under this pine tree is stricken with a desire to hang himself. Though there are several dozen pine trees on the bank, every time someone hangs himself, it is invariably on this particular tree that the body is found dangling. I can assure you there are at least two or three such danglings every year. It would be unthinkable to go and dangle on any other pine. As I stared at the tree I noted that a branch stuck out conveniently toward the pavement. Ah! What an exquisitely fashioned branch. It would be a real pity to leave it as it is. I wish so much that I could arrange for some human body to be suspended there. I look around to see if anyone is coming. Unfortunately, no one comes. It can’t be helped.

  Shall I hang myself? No, no, if I hang myself, I’ll lose my life. I won’t because it’s dangerous. But I’ve heard a story that an ancient Greek used to entertain banquet parties by giving demonstrations of how to hang oneself. A man would stand on a stool and the very second that he put his head through a noose, a second man would kick the stool from under him. The trick was that the first man would loosen the knot in the rope just as his stool was kicked away, and so drop down unharmed. If this story is really true, I’ve no need to be frightened. So thinking I might try the trick myself, I place my hand on the branch and find it bends in a manner precisely appropriate. Indeed the way it bends is positively aesthetic. I feel extraordinarily happy as I try to picture myself floating on this branch. I felt I simply must try it, but then I began to think that it would be inconsiderate if Beauchamp were waiting for me. Right, I would first see Beauchamp and have the chat I’d promised; thereafter I could come out again. So thinking, I went home.”