I Am a Cat

by Sōseki Natsume

  “What happened to his bath?”

  “Oh, he was certainly planning to take it, but when he’d gone some way down the corridor he suddenly remembered he’d left his purse behind so he came back to get it. Damn cheek! As if I’d steal someone’s purse. . .”

  “Well, wouldn’t you? You seem to have been pretty quick with his cigarettes.”

  “You must be joking. That’s not the same at all. Anyway, apart from his disgraceful behavior in that matter of the purse, the old man proved a person of real feeling. When he opened the door, the room was thick with at least two days worth of cigarette smoke. Ill news travels fast, they say. It didn’t take him long to read the situation.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He hadn’t lived all those years without growing more shrewd than that. Saying nothing, he wrapped some fifty or sixty cigarettes in a piece of paper; then, turning to me, he courteously observed, ‘Do please forgive their miserable quality, but if these cigarettes could be of any use to you, I’d be honored if you’d accept them.’Then he went off down to the bath.”

  “Perhaps that’s what’s meant by ‘the Tokyo style.’”

  “I don’t know if it’s Tokyo style or draper’s style; anyway, after that incident, the old man and I became firm friends and we spent a most enjoyable two weeks together.”

  “With free fags for a fortnight?”

  “Since you ask me, yes.”

  My master finds it difficult to give in gracefully, but he sometimes tries. He accordingly closed his book, rolled off his stomach and said, as he sat up, “Have you finished with that violin?”

  “Not yet. We’re just coming to the interesting part, so do please listen. As for that person flaked out on the go board—what was his name?—What? Singleman? Well, I’d like him to listen, too. It’s bad for him to sleep so much. Surely it’s time we woke him up.”

  “Hey, Singleman, wake up. Wake up. This is an interesting story. Do wake up. They say it’s bad for you to sleep so much. Your wife is getting anxious.”

  “Eh?” Singleman lifted up his face. Slobber had dribbled down his goatee to leave a long shining line as if a slug had trailed its slime across him. “I was sleeping,” he managed to get out, “like a white cloud on the mountain top. I’ve had a delightful nap.”

  “We’ve all seen how delightfully you sleep. Suppose you wake up now.”

  “I expect it’s time I woke. Has anyone had anything to say worth hearing?”

  “Coldmoon’s been telling us about his violin. He’s just about to. . .

  What was it he was going to do? Come on, Sneaze. What was it?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

  Coldmoon intervened. “I am,” he said, ‘just about to play it.”

  “He’s going to play his violin at last. Come over here and join us as we listen.”

  “Still that violin? Bother.”

  “You’ve no cause to be bothered because you’re one of those people who only play on stringless harps; Coldmoon here has every reason to be bothered out of his tiny skull because his screeching squawks are heard all over the neighborhood.”

  “Ah, yes? Coldmoon, don’t you yet know how to play a violin without being heard by your neighbors?”

  “No, I don’t. If there is such a way, I’d very much like to learn about it.”

  “There’s really nothing to learn. Just concentrate, as all the Zen masters advise, on the pure, white cow which stands there in the alley.

  Desire will drop away from you and, as enlightenment occurs, you’ll find you already know how soundless music can be played. And because you’ll already know, you’ll have no need to learn.” Singleman’s distorted messages from the Gateless Gate, even when he’s wide awake, are usually incomprehensible.

  But Coldmoon simply assumed that the man babbled like that because his brains were still floating about somewhere in the land of Nod. So he deliberately ignored him and continued with his story. “After long thought I devised a plan. The next day, being the Emperor’s Birthday, was a national holiday and I proposed to spend it in bed. But I felt restless all day long and I kept getting up, first to lift and then to replace the lid of my wicker box. When, in due course, the daylight faded and the crickets in the bottom of my grandmother’s parting gift began to chirrup, I took my courage in both hands and lifted the violin and its bow from their biding place.”

  “At wonderful last,” chirruped Beauchamp, “Coldmoon’s going to play.”

  “Take it easy, now,” warns Waverhouse. “Gently, gently, Coldmoon.

  Don’t do anything hasty. Let caution rule your twilight.”

  “First I took out the bow and examined it from its tip to its guard. . .”

  “You sound like some half-witted seller of swords,” chaffed Waverhouse.

  “If you can take a bow in your hands and feel that it is your own soul that you’re holding, then you will have achieved that same spiritual condition which transfuses a samurai when he unsheathes his white-honed blade and dotes upon it in the failing light of autumn. Holding that bow in my hands I trembled like a leaf.”

  “Ah, what a genius!” sighs Beauchamp.

  “Ah, what an epileptic,” adds Waverhouse tartly.

  “Please,” said my master, “please get on with playing it. And right away. Now.”

  Singleman makes a wry face as though acknowledging the pointless-ness of trying to bring light to the invincibly ignorant.

  “Happily the bow proved in perfect condition. Next I took the violin and, holding it close under the lamp, examined its front and back. All these preparations had taken about five minutes. Please now try to picture the scene. Tirelessly, from the bottom of their box, the crickets are still chirruping. . .”

  “We’ll imagine anything you like. Set your mind at rest, take up your precious instrument and play.”

  “No, not yet. Now I have checked it over and, like its bow, the violin is flawless. All is wonderfully well. I spring to my feet. . .”

  “Are you going out?”

  “Oh, do keep quiet and listen. I cannot tell this story if you keep interrupting every single phrase. . .”

  “Gentlemen! We are to be silent. Hush!” calls Waverhouse commandingly.

  “It’s you yourself who do the interrupting.”

  “Oh, I see. I beg your pardon. Pray carry on.”

  “With the violin beneath my arm, soft-soled sandals on my feet, I had taken some few steps beyond the outer glass door of my lodgings when. . .”

  “I knew it. I knew it. I knew in my bones there was going to be a breakdown. Coldmoon cannot walk two steps or breathe two minutes without a hitch or hang-up.”

  “I suppose you do realize,” said my master at his most sarcastic, “that there are no more dried persimmons hanging from the eaves. Even if you’re now very hungry there’s no point in turning home for them.”

  “It is highly regrettable that two such scholars as you and you”—Coldmoon nodded at Waverhouse and Sneaze— “should persist in behaving like common hecklers. I shall have to address my further remarks to Mr. Beauchamp only. Now, Beauchamp, as I was saying, though I had left my lodgings, I was obliged to turn back for something I should need. Thereafter, having draped around my head a scarlet blanket (for which I’d paid three yen and twenty sen in my own hometown before I left it years before), I blew out the lamp. Unfortunately, in the consequent pitch darkness I could not find my sandals.”

  “But why did you want to go out? Where were you off to?”

  “Patience, patience. I shall come to that. At long last, outside in my scarlet blanket, my violin beneath my coat, I again found myself as on the previous night, ankle deep in fallen leaves under a star lit sky. I turned away to the right and, as I came to the foot of Mount Ko-shin, the boom of the temple bell on Eastern Peak struck through my blanket shrouded ears and penetrated to my inmost head. Beauchamp, can you guess what time it was?”

  “This is your story, Coldmoon. I’ve no idea what th
e time was.”

  “Beauchamp, it is nine; nine and the evening chill. I am now climbing through the early autumn darkness along a mountain path which rises nearly three thousand feet to a sort of terrace plateau which the locals call Big Flat. Timid as I am, at any other time I’d have been scared clean out of my wits, but it’s one of those strange things that, when the mind is truly concentrated upon one specific aim, all sense of being frightened or not frightened is wiped from one’s heart. Odd as it must sound, I had become a lion-heart by virtue of my single-minded lust to play a fiddle. This place, Big Flat, is a famous beauty spot on the south flank of Mount Ko-shin. Looking down from there on a fine day, one can see through the red pines the whole layout of the castle town below. I’d guess the level area must cover some four hundred square yards and, smack in the middle of it, a large, flat rock protrudes to form a low fifteen-square-yard platform. On the north side of Big Flat there’s a swampy pond called Cormorant’s Marsh, and around the pond there’s nothing but a thick stand of quite enormous camphor trees, each one no less than three arm-spans around. The place is deep in the mountains and the only sign of man is a small hut used by the camphor gatherers.

  Even by day the pond oppresses the visitor with its air of sodden gloom.

  Remote as it is, Big Flat is not too hard to visit because, on some long-ago maneuvres, the Corps of Engineers cut a pathway up the mountain-side. When I finally reached the flat rock, I spread out my scarlet blanket and sat down on it. I’d never climbed up here before on a night so cold and, as my pulse steadied, I began to feel the surrounding loneliness encroach upon me as a kind of cramp creeping ever deeper into my belly. When one is thus alone in the mountains the sheer intensity of that loneliness can fill the mind with a feeling of terror; but if that feeling can be emptied away, all that remains in the mind is an extraordinary sense of icy crystalline clarity. For some twenty minutes I sat there on my scarlet rug completely abstracted from my normal self and feeling as though I were totally alone in a palace of pure crystal. It was as though every bit of me, my body, even my soul, had become transparent, as if made of some kind of quartz, and I could no longer tell whether I was inside that palace of crystal or that freezing palace was within my belly.”

  Not quite sure how to react to Coldmoon’s strange account, Waverhouse contented himself with a style of teasing more demure than his mocking wont. “How terrible,” he said. Singleman, however, was genuinely impressed by Coldmoon’s personal report of a state of consciousness not unknown to many meditation sects. “Quite extraordinary,” he observed. “Most interesting.”

  “Had my condition of cold translucency persisted, I might well have stayed frozen on that rock until I melted in the morning sun. Then I should never have played my violin.”

  “Have there been any earlier reports,” Beauchamp asked, “to suggest that Big Flat might be haunted? You know, by foxes, badgers, or any other such shape-changing creatures?”

  “As I was saying, I couldn’t even tell whether I was my own self or not, and I scarcely knew if I were alive or dead when suddenly I heard a harsh screaming cry from the far end of the old marsh.”

  “Aha,” says Waverhouse, “things are happening.”

  “This awful cry, like a blast of autumn wind tossing the treetops, echoed away far and deep across the entire mountain; at its sound, I came to myself with a jerk.”

  “What a relief!” sighed Waverhouse, heaving a grotesquely simulated sigh.

  “As the masters say, ‘One must perish into life.’ Isn’t that so, Coldmoon?” Even Singleman, who winked as he offered his observation, now seems disposed to treat his friend’s spiritual experience in the spirit of light farce. However, his Zen reference was completely lost on Coldmoon.

  “Having been thus startled back into my usual self, I looked around me. The whole vast mountain was now dead quiet: nothing, not even the drip of a raindrop, could be heard. What then was that ghastly cry? Too piercing to have been human, too loud for any bird. Could it have been a monkey? But around there there aren’t any monkeys. What on earth could it have been? Once that question had entered my head and I began to search around for its answer, all the demons of misgiving who had hitherto lain quiet in the crannies of my mind erupted into pandemonium. You remember how the city crowds went wild, people running here and there and even all over each other in a lunacy of welcome, when Prince Arthur of Connaught came to Tokyo in February 1906? Well, inside my head it was worse than that. And then things suddenly came to a crisis. I felt my very pores gape open and through their yawn my body’s flightiest visitors—Courage, Pluck, Prudence, and Composure departed from me. Like cheap alcohol blown in a spray on hairy shins to cool them, my visitors evaporated. Under my ribs my heart began to hammer. It leapt and danced like a red frog. My legs trembled like the humming strings of a kite. And my nerve broke. In mindless panic I grabbed my scarlet blanket around my head and, with the violin clutched beneath one arm, I scrambled down from the low flat rock and helter-skelter fled away down the rough mountain path. When, scampering like a rat through the layers of dead leaves, I came at last to my lodgings, I crept in quietly and hid myself in my bed. I had been so exhausted by terror that I fell immediately asleep. D’you know, Beauchamp, that was the most terrifying experience of my whole life.”

  “And then?”

  “That’s it. There isn’t any more.”

  “No playing of the violin?”

  “How could I possibly have played? If you had heard that eldritch cry, I bet my boots the last thing you’d have thought about would be playing a violin.”

  “I find your story less than satisfactory.”

  “Perhaps so, but it was the truth.” Coldmoon, vastly pleased with himself, surveyed his audience. “Well,” he said, “and what did you think of it?”

  “Excellent. A point well taken,” laughed Waverhouse. “You really must have gone through great travail to bring your story to that remarkable conclusion. In fact, I’ve been following your account with the closest attention, for it seemed increasingly clear to me that, in the person of yourself, these Eastern climes have perhaps been visited by a male reincarnation of Sandra Belloni.” Waverhouse paused in the obvious hope that someone would give him an opportunity to air his knowledge of Meredith’s heroine by asking for clarification of this obscure reference. But all the members of his audience, having been caught that way before, held their peace; so Waverhouse, regrettably uncued, simply rattled on. “Just as Sandra Belloni’s harp playing and Italian song in a moonlit forest called down the goddess of that silver orb, so Coldmoon’s near performance with a violin upon the ledges of Mount Ko-shin called up some phantom badger from a fen. There is, of course, a difference of degree but the principle’s the same. What I find peculiarly interesting is that such a slight difference in degree should produce so vast a difference in result: in Sandra’s case a manifestation of ethereal beauty, but in Coldmoon’s nothing but crude and earthy farce. That must have been a painful disappointment to you.”

  “No disappointment at all,” said Coldmoon who seemed genuinely uninterested, perhaps not in his own weird experience, but certainly in Waverhouse’s question.

  “Trying to play a violin on a mountain top! What effete behavior! It serves you right that you got scared silly.” My master’s scathing comment showed his usual lack of sympathy with anything beyond the world of his own wizened imagination.

  Singleman piped in:

  “How more than pitiful it is to find

  That one must live one’s human life confined

  Within a world of an inhuman kind.”

  None of Singleman’s mangled quotations from the works of deluded medieval metaphysicians ever makes the least sense to Coldmoon. Or to anyone else. Perhaps not even to Singleman. His words were left to float away into the nothingness of a long silence.

  After a while, Waverhouse changed the subject by asking, “Incidentally, Coldmoon, are you still haunting the university in order to polish your little,
glass balls?”

  “No. My visit home rather interrupted things. Indeed, I doubt if I’ll ever resume that line of research. It was always, if you’ll pardon the joke, something of a grind, and lately I’ve been finding it a real bore.”

  “But without your polished beads, you won’t get your doctorate,” says my master, looking slightly worried.

  Coldmoon seems no more concerned about his doctorate than he was with his failure to become a Japanese version of Sandra Belloni. “Oh that,” he says with a careless laugh. “I’ve no longer any need for a degree.”

  “But then the marriage will be canceled and both sides will be upset.”

  “Marriage? Whose marriage?”

  “Yours.”

  “To whom am I supposed to be getting married?”

  “To the Goldfield girl.”

  “Really?”

  “But surely you’ve already plighted your troth?”

  “I’ve never plighted anything. I had no part in the spread of that particular rumor.”

  “That’s a bit thick,” says my master. “I say, Waverhouse, you, too, remember that incident, don’t you?”

  “Incident? You mean that business when the Nose came shoving herself in here? If so, it’s not just you and I who’ve heard about the engagement, but the world and his wife have long been in on the secret. As a matter of fact, I’m constantly being pestered by some quite respectable newspapers who want me to let them know when they may have the honor of printing photographs of Coldmoon and his blushing Opula in their Happy Couples column. What’s more, Beauchamp there finished his epic epithalamium, ‘A Song of Lovebirds,’ at least three months ago and has since been waiting anxiously to learn the right date for its publication. You don’t want your masterpiece to rot in the ground like buried treasure just because Coldmoon’s grown bored with buffing up his little, glass beads, do you, Beauchamp, eh?”