I Am A Cat

This book, Sōseki Natsume's classic of Japanese literature and hilarious philosophical ramble, is narrated by, yet almost nothing to do with, a cat. I bought it last year in Oxfam literally for the sole reason that the title made me chortle, and read it while on travels in Europe for the last two weeks. It was much more appropriate as a holiday-book than the other which I took along.
   Anyway. The eponymous furry hero has no name, and the novel, having originally been published as a series of ten magazine installments, has little in the way of plot or development. But no matter, as this work is more of a collection of lengthy quirky snapshots than it is an actual story, and at being what it is, it's fantastically entertaining.

   Narrating a rather long novel from a cat's point of view in a way intelligible to human readers would get very boring very soon if it were just a rationalised account of that cat's activity (though his short-lived love-interest with neighbouring Tortoiseshell, his attempts to catch a rat, and his consorts with disreputable cat Rickshaw Blacky alone provide for this aspect of the book), and so craftily Natsume spun together a cast of lovably weird characters who habituate the cat's owner's home, each providing anecdotes, jokes, tales and arguments aplenty. There's Mr Sneaze, who unlovingly and absent-mindedly owns the cat itself; he's a crackpot lazy grump teacher with stomach problems and academic pretensions about western literature. Mrs Sneaze, his condescending critic of a wife, the three young Sneaze children, and the threatening housekeeper O-san all pose further irritations and/or amusements to the cat. Then Sneaze's friends and acquaintances who regularly visit the house are indispensable as aids to the flow of random conversation: the slimy businessman Suzuki; the zen-obsessive thinker Singleman; the happy-go-lucky poet Beauchamp Blowlamp; the sarcastic maybe-lovestruck-but-probably-just-utterly-blasé science student Coldmoon; and of course the unforgettably irreverent fount of blunt interjections and verbose pointless wisecracks, Waverhouse.

   The majority of the book sees the cat sitting in on the conversation of various selections of these other characters, and quietly lending its supercilious feline judgement on them as they speak. Topics range from the cause of selfishness in modern humans to the size of the nose of Mrs Goldfield to prolonged confusion over whom her daughter is actually meant to be getting engaged to; there are lengthy diatribes against snake soup, schoolchildren, baldness, Waverhouse's trolling habits, and Coldmoon's inability to finish an anecdote about the time he wanted to buy a violin. Though wordy and long, all of these are hilarious, and display a deep penetrating insight into changing social philosophies at the time. Natsume was well-learned in ancient Chinese, Japanese and Western philosophy and literature, and at the time of his writing this Japanese culture was embarking on an upheaval of values as it became more open to the alien west, and many of the doubts and concerns and issues swirling the cultural mindset of early 19th century Japan are encapsulated and discussed (light-heartedly but deep-mindedly) by the characters who sit in Sneaze's study within earshot of the wise narrator Cat; and yet it never loses its levity until the end (I won't say why, because the end is sad).

   The tendency of the book to be more about the humans' conversation and attitudes rather than the cat made me think about the interesting link between narration in fiction and explanation in non-fiction. A lot of the time, the cat is just providing an open window onto the page for a splash of social commentary (though sometimes these are delightfully cut short by the cat getting bored and wandering outside). To what extent can a book do that before it ceases to be a novel and becomes a self-responsive dialogue of thought? Obviously a book can express values, but how far can it openly discuss them in character speech before they take the place of underlying prose and become what the book's about? Natsume avoided such a ptifall by lending the conversations over to the cat's inattentiveness or judgemental responses, or simply by the sardonic boredom of Coldmoon, Sneaze or Waverhouse. A minor but interesting point. 

   A final hat-tip to the translators, Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, is definitely in order too: English and Japanese are very different languages each with great depths of nuance in formality and tone, but they seem to have been transposed perfectly. Metaphors, similes, idioms and even puns have been carried across into English in a way that reads naturally and makes sense and still carries the humour, and though I can't read the original Japanese to double-check, obviously this must've taken a huge amount of cross-linguo-cultural skill, so, cheers.

   Anyway, this is a great book. Truly a work of a great comical and philosophical mind, and absolutely worth a read if you like funny interesting classics. Or cats.