At the best of times, each teetering step I take could throw me clean off-balance, which makes it all the more unpardonable that these three blackamoors should loaf here blocking the way. If it comes to the worst, I shall just have to abandon today’s exercises and hop down from the fence. It’s a bore, of course, but perhaps I might as well hop down now.
After all, I am heavily outnumbered by the enemy. Besides, the poor simple things do seem to be strangers in these parts. Their beaks, I notice, are almost affectedly pointed, the sort of savage, stabbing snout that, found amongst his sons, would make its foul possessor the most sharply favored member of a long-nosed goblin’s brood. The signs are unmistakable that these Crow-magnon louts will be equally ill-natured.
If I start a fight and then, by sheer mischance, happen to lose my foot-ing, the loss of face will be much greater than if I just chose to disengage. Consequently, thinking that it might be prudent to avoid a showdown, I had just decided to hop down when the arse-presenting savage offered me a rudery. “Arseholes,” he observed. His immediate neighbor repeated this coarse remark, while the last one of the trio took the trouble to say it twice. I simply could not overlook behavior so offensive.
First and foremost, to allow myself to be grossly insulted in my own garden by these mere crows would reflect adversely upon my good name.
Should you object that I do not have a name to be reflected upon, I will amend that sentence to refer to reflections upon my honor. When my honor is involved, cost what it may, I cannot retreat. At this point it occurred to me that a disorderly rabble is often described as a “flock of crows;” so it is just possible that, though they outnumber me three to one, when it comes to the crunch they’ll prove more weak than they look. Thus comforted, thus grimly resolute, I began slowly to advance.
The crows, oblivious to my action, seem to be talking among themselves. They are exasperating! If only the fence were wider by five or six inches, I’d really give them hell. But as things are, however vehemently vexed I may feel, I can only tiptoe slowly forward to avenge my injured honor. Eventually, I reached a point a bare half-foot away from the nearest bird and was urging myself onward to one last final effort when, all together and as though by prearrangement, the three brutes suddenly flapped their wings and lumbered up to hang a couple of feet above me in the air. The down-draught gusted into my face. Unsportingly surprised, I lost my balance and fell off sideways into the garden.
Kicking myself for permitting such a shameful mishap to occur, I looked up from the ground to find all three marauders safely landed back again where they had perched before. Their three sharp beaks in parallel alignment, they peer down superciliously into my angry eyes.
The bloody nerve of them! I responded with a glowering scowl. Which left them quite unmoved. So next I snarled and arched my back. Equally ineffective. Just as the subtlety of symbolic poetry is lost on a material-ist, so were the symbols of my anger quite meaningless to the crows.
Which, now that I reflect upon the matter, is perfectly understandable.
Hitherto, and wrongly, I have been seeking to cope with crows as if they had been cats. Had that been the case, they would by now, most certainly, have reacted. But crows are crows, and what but crow behavior can anyone expect of them? My efforts have, in fact, all been as pointless as the increasingly short-tempered arguments of a businessman trying to budge my master; as pointless as Yoritomo’s gift of a solid silver cat to the unworldly Saigyo; as pointless as the bird shit that these fools and their fool cousins fly over to Ueno to deposit on the statue of poor Sai-o Takamori. Once I have conceived a thought, I waste no time before I act upon it. It were better to give up than to persist in a dialogue with dunces, so I abandoned my endeavors and withdrew to the veranda.
It was time for dinner anyway.
Exercise has merits, but one mustn’t overdo it. My whole body felt limp and almost slovenly. What’s more I feel horribly hot. We are now at the beginning of autumn, and during my exercise my fur seems to have become saturated with afternoon sunshine. The sweat which oozes from the pores in my skin refuses to drop away, but clings in greasy clots around the roots of every separate hair. My back itches. One can clearly distinguish between itches caused by perspiration and itches caused by creeping fleas. If the site of the itch lies within reach of my mouth, I can bite the cause, and if within reach of my feet, I know precisely how to scratch it. But if the irritation is at the midpoint of my spine, I simply can’t get at it. In such a case, one must either frot oneself on the first available human being or scrape one’s back against a pine tree’s bark.
Since men are both vain and stupid, I approach them in a suitably ingratiating manner using, as they would say, “tones that would wheedle a cat.” Such are the tones men sometimes use to me, but, seen from my position, the phrase should be “tones by which a cat may be wheedled.”
Not that it matters. Anyway, human beings being the nitwits that they are, a purring approach to any of them, either male or female, is usually interpreted as proof that I love them, and they consequently let me do as I like, and on occasions, poor dumb creatures, they even stroke my head. Of late, however, just because some kind of parasitic insect, fleas, in fact, have taken to breeding in my fur, even my most tentative approaches to a human being evoke a gross response. I am grabbed by the scruff of the neck and pitched clean out of the room. It seems that this sudden aversion stems from human disgust with those barely visible and totally insignificant insects which I harbor. A heartless and most callous attitude! How can such inconsiderate behavior possibly be justified by the presence in my coat of one or two thousand footling fleas? The answer is, of course, that Article One of those Laws of Love (by which all human creatures regulate their lives) specifically enjoins that “ye shall love one another for so long as it serves thine individual interest.”
Now that the human attitude towards me has so completely changed, I cannot exploit manpower to ease my itching, however virulent it may become. I therefore have no choice but to resort to the alternative method of finding relief in scraping myself on pine bark. To that end I was just going down the veranda steps when I realized that even this alternative solution was a silly idea and would not work. The point is that 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 inextri-cably stuck. I am a dainty cat of candid temperament, and any creature as clinging, poisonous, and vindictive as this tenacious resin is an anath-ema to me. I cannot stand persons of that kind, and even if one such particular person were the most beautiful cat in the world, let alone a creature loathsome as resin, still I’d be revolted. It is outrageous that my charmingly pale gray coat can be ruined by a substance whose social and evolutionary status is no higher than that of the gummy muck which streams in the cold north wind from the corners of Rickshaw Blacky’s eyes. Resin ought to realize the impropriety of its nature, but will, of course, do no such thing. Indeed, the very moment my back makes contact with a pine tree, great clots of resin gather on my fur. To have anything to do with so insensitive, so inconsiderate a creature would not only be beneath my personal dignity, but would be a defilement to anyone in my coat and lineage. I conclude that, however fleasome I may feel, I have no choice but to grin and bear it. Nonetheless, it is extremely disheartening to find that the two standard means of alleviating my discomfort are both unavailable. Unless I can quickly find some other solution, the irritation in my skin, and the thought of gumminess in my mind, will bring me to a nervous breakdown.
Sinking down upon my hind-legs into a thinking posture, I had scarcely begun my search for bright ideas when an illuminating memory flashed upon me. Every so often my scruffy master saunters off out of the house with a cake of soap and a hand towel. When he returns some thirty or forty minutes later, his normally dull complexion, while not exactly glowin
g, has nevertheless acquired a certain modest liveliness. If such expeditions can confer a sheen of vitality upon that shabby sloven, what wonders they might work upon myself. It is, of course, true that I am already so extremely handsome that improvements, if possible, are hardly necessary, but if by some misfortune I were to fall sick and perish at this very tender age of one year and a few odd months, I could never forgive myself for allowing so irremediable a loss to be inflicted upon the populace of the world. I believe that the object of my master’s sorties is one of those devices invented by mankind as a means of easing the tedium of its existence. Inasmuch as the public bath is an invention of mankind, it can hardly be much use to anyone but, clutching as I am at straws, I might as well investigate the matter. If it’s as pointless as I anticipate, nothing would be simpler than to drop my enquiries; but I remain unsure whether human beings are sufficiently broadminded to give a cat, a member of another species, even a chance to investigate the efficacy of an institution devised for human purposes.
I cannot imagine that I could be refused entry when nobody dreams of questioning the casual comings and goings of my master, but it would be socially most embarrassing to find myself turned from the door.
Prudence suggests the wisdom of reconnaissance and, if I like the look of the place, then I can hop in with a hand towel in my mouth. My plan of action formed, I set off for the public bath at a properly leisurely pace.
As one turns left around the corner from our side street, one may observe a little further up the road an object like an upended bamboo waterpipe puffing thin smoke-fumes straight up into the sky. That fum-ing finger marks the site of the public bathhouse. I stole in through its back entrance. That style of entry is usually looked down upon as mean-spirited or cowardly, but such criticisms are merely the tedious grumbles spiced with jealousy which one must expect from persons only capable of gaining access by front doors. It is abundantly clear from the records of history that persons of high intelligence invariably launch attacks both suddenly and from the rear. Furthermore, I note from my study of The Making of a Gentleman (volume two, chapter one, pages five and six) that a backdoor, like a gentleman’s last will and testament, provides the means whereby an individual establishes his true moral excellence. Being a truly twentieth-century cat, I have had included in my education, more than sufficient of such weighty learning, to make it inappropriate for anyone to sneer at my selected mode of entry. Anyway, once I was inside, I found on my immediate left a positive mountain of pine logs cut into eight-inch lengths and, next to it, a heaped-up hill of coal. Some of my readers may wonder what the subtle significance of my careful distinction between a mountain of logs and a mere hill of coal is.
There is, in fact, no subtle significance whatsoever. I simply used the two words, “hill” and “mountain,” as they should correctly be used. Far from having time to think about literary niceties, I am overwhelmed with pity for the human race which, having regularly dieted on such revolting objects as rice, birds, fish, and even animals, is now apparently reduced to munching lumps of coal. Right in front of me I see an open entrance about six feet wide. I peep through and find everything dead quiet but, from somewhere beyond, there comes a lively buzz of human voices and I deduce that the bath must be where the sound originates. I move forward between the woodpile and the coal heap, turn left and find a glazed window to my right. On the ledge below, a considerable number of small round tubs is piled up into a pyramid. My heart goes out to them, for it must be painfully contrary to a round thing’s concept of reality to be constricted within a triangular world. To the south of these piles the sill juts out for a few feet with, as if to welcome me, wooden boarding on it. Since the board is roughly three feet up from the ground, it is, from my point of view, at an ideal hopping height. “All right,” I said to myself, and, as I flew up nimbly to the board, the public bath, like something dangled, suddenly appeared beneath my very nose.
There is nothing in the world more pleasant than to eat something one has never yet eaten, or to see something one has never seen before.
If my readers, like my master, spend thirty or forty minutes on three days of every passing week in the world of the public bath, then of course that world can offer them few surprises: but if, like me, they have never seen that spectacle, they should make immediate arrangements to do so. Don’t worry about the deathbed of your parents, but at all costs do not miss the grand show of the public bath. The world is wide, but in my opinion it has no sight more startlingly remarkable to offer.
Wherein, you ask, resides its crass spectacularity? Well, it is so variously spectacular that I hesitate to particularize. First of all, the human beings vociferously swarming about beyond the window-glass are all stark naked. As totally unclothed as Formosan aborigines. Primeval Adams still prancing about in this twentieth century. I am moved by so much nudity to preface my comments with a history of clothing, but it would take so long that I will spare my readers any rehash of the learned observations of Herr Doktor Diogenes Teufelsdrockh in his monumental study on this subject ( Die Kleider, Werden und Wizken) and simply refer them to a slightly less learned commentary on that work, Mr. Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. The essential fact remains that the clothes are the man, that the ungarbed man is nothing. Skipping centuries of sartorial civilization, indeed a tautological phrase, I would remind my readers that Beau Nash, in the heyday of his social regulation of eighteenth-century Bath, a royally patronized hotsprings spa in the west of England, established the inflexible rule that men and women submerging themselves in those salutary waters should, nevertheless, be clothed from their shoulders down to their feet. A further relevant incident occurred, again in a certain English city, just after the mid-point of the nineteenth century. It so happened that this city then founded a School of Art and, quite naturally, the school’s function involved the presence and display of various studies, drawings, paintings, models, and statues of the naked human figure. But the inauguration of this school placed both its own staff and the city fathers in a deeply embarrassing situation. There could be no question but that the leading ladies of the city must be invited to the opening ceremony. Unfortunately, all civilized females of that era were unshakably sure that human beings are clothes-animals having no relationship whatsoever, let alone blood-kinship, with the skin-clad apes.
A man without his clothes, they knew it for a fact, was like an elephant shorn of its trunk, a school without its students, soldiers devoid of courage. Anyone without the other of these pairs would be so totally decharacterized as to become, if not a complete nonentity, at least an entity of a basely tran-substantiated nature, and a man so transubstanti-ated would be, at best, a beast. The ladies, as the saying is, laid it on the line. “For us to consort with such beast-humans, even though those bestialities were only present in the form of drawings and statues, would compromise our honor. If they are to be present at the ceremony, we will not attend.”The school authorities thought the ladies were all being a little silly but, in the West as in the East, women, however physically unfit for the hard slog of pounding rice or of slashing about on the battlefield, are indispensably ornamental features of any opening ceremony.
What, then, could be done? The school authorities took themselves off to a draper’s shop, bought thirty-five and seven-eighths rolls of suitable black material and clothed their beastly prints, their less-than-human statues, in a hundred yards of humanizing huckaback. Lest any lady’s modesty might be outraged accidentally, they even masked the faces of their statues in swathes of sable stuffs. European marble and Hellenic plaster thus yashmaked out of the animal kingdom, I am happy to record that the ceremony went off to the complete satisfaction of all concerned.
From those remarkable accounts the importance of clothes to mankind may be deduced. But, very recently, there has been a swing in the opposite direction and people may now be found who go about incessantly advocating nudity, praising nude pictures and generally making a naked menace of themselves. I think they ar
e in error. Indeed, since I have remained decently clothed from the moment of my birth, how could I think otherwise? The craze for the nude began when, at the Renaissance, the traditional customs of the ancient Greeks and Romans were repopularized, for their own lewd ends, by the Italianate promot-ers of that cultural rebirth. The ancient Greeks and Romans were culturally accustomed to nudity, and it is highly unlikely that they recognized any connection between nakedness and public morality. But in northern Europe the prevailing climate is cold. Even in Japan there is a saying that “one cannot travel naked,” so that, by natural law, in Germany or England, a naked man is very soon a dead one. Since dying is daft, northerners wear clothes. And when everyone wears clothes, human beings become clothes-animals. And having once become clothes-animals, they are unable to conceive that any naked animal whom they may happen to run across could possibly also be human. Its absence of clobber immediately identifies its brutish nature. Consequently, it is understandable that Europeans, especially northern Europeans, might regard nude pictures and nude statues as essentially bestial. In other words, Europeans and Japanese have the good sense to recognize nudes and representations of nudity as life-forms inferior to cats. But nudes are beautiful, you say? What of it? Beasts, though beautiful, are beasts. Some of my more knowledgeable readers, seeking to catch me in an inconsistency, may possibly ask whether I’ve ever seen a European lady in evening dress? Inevitably, being only a cat, I’ve never had that honor. But I am reliably advised that Western ladies in formal evening wear do in fact expose their shoulders, arms, and even breasts, which is, of course, disgusting. Before Renaissance times, women’s dress styles did not sink to such scandalous levels, to such ridiculous decolletages. Instead, at all times women wore the clothes one would normally expect on any human being. Why, then, have they transformed themselves to look like vulgar acrobats? It would be far too wearisome to set down all the dreary history of that decadence. Let it suffice that those who know the reasons, know them, and that those who don’t, don’t need to. In any event, whatever the historical background, the fact remains that modern women, each and every night, trick themselves out in virtual undress and evince the deepest self-satisfaction with their bizarre appearances.
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