'NATSUME SOSEKI'S: I AM A CAT'

I am a Cat by the twentieth century Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki is a great read. It is a sprawling and scathing satire of a school teacher written by his cat. There are descriptions of his friends, neighbours and family all designed to show him in the most grotesque possible light. He, of course, can't see any of this. Some of my favourite episodes include;

 

1. The narrator reflecting on his own role in the observation of the ongoing disgrace of his master: "I sometimes think I really must be blood-kin to that monster cat one sees in ancient picture books. They say that every toad carries in its fore-head a gem that in the darkness utters light, but packed within my tail I carry not only the power of God, Buddha, Confucius, Love, and even Death, but also an infallible panacea  for all ills that could bewitch the entire human race" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 1, Chapter 3). 
 
2. The narrator's description of his master the school teacher: "The others in the house think that he is terribly hard-working. But actually he works lees hard than any of them think. Sometimes I tiptoe to his study for a peep and find him taking a snooze. Occassionaly his mouth is drooling onto some book he has begun to read. He has a weak stomach and his skin is a pale yellowish color, inelastic and lacking in vitality. Nevertheless he is a great gormandiser. After eating a great deal, he takes some taka-diatase for his stomach, and after that, he opens a book. When he has read a few pages, he becomes sleepy. He drools onto the book. This is the routinue religiously observed each evening" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 1 Chapter 1.) 
 
3. A descritpion of the master's blanket: "It makes a squalid hut, whose only distinctions are the tufts of shepherd's purse sprouting from its roof, no less gaily warm  than, for all its solid comfort, the Goldfield's mansion. I am, however, obliged to confess that that blanket jars with the day's spring feeling. No doubt its manufacturer meant that it should be white. No doubt, too, it was sold as white by some haberdasher specializing in good imported from abroad. No less certainly, my master must have asked for a white blanket at the time he bought it. But all that happened twelve or thirteen years ago, and since that far-off Age of White, the blanket has declined into a Dark Age where its present color is a somber gray. No doubt the passage of time will eventually turn it black, but I'd be surprised if the thing survived that long. It is already so badly worn that one can easily count the individual threads of its warp and woof. Its wooliness is gone and it would be an exaggeration, even a presumption, to describe this scrawny half-eroded object as a blanket" (translated by Aiko Ito and Grameme Wilson, Volume 2, Book 1).
 
4. On the nature of the narrator's difference to his master: "All created things are entitled to demand of their Creator some rest for recreation. We are born with an obligation to keep going while we can, and if, like maggots wriggling in the fabric of this world, we are to keep on thrashing about down here, we do need rest to do it. If the Creator should take the line that I am born to work and not to sleep, I would agree that I am indeed born to work but I would also make the unanswerable point that I cannot work unless I also rest. Even my master, that timid but complaining crank in the grinding mechanism of our national education, sometimes though it costs him money, takes a weekday off. I am no human cog. I am a cat, a being sensitive to the most subtle shades of thought and feeling. Naturally I tire more quickly than my master" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 2, Book 2).