by Kij Johnson
Smell was different, she found. Things that had seemed obvious before—warm scents, like dung and the musk of other animals—were muted in her nostrils, while others—pine and cypress, distant hearth smoke—were sharper than she remembered. For a time as she walked she tried to imagine what people might gain by smelling such things so strongly; but she gave up at last, not seeing the point of smelling anything she could not eat.
Standing upright was not such an advantage. She saw much farther, but not as far as she could have in a tree. As the day passed her back ached, even though her muscles as a woman seemed better adapted to a long day’s travel than her cat’s body ever had. She had seen people pass her bearing sticks they leaned on. When she found a fallen branch, she used her knife (again, she knew just how to do this, as if she had been born with fingers) to lop off the unnecessary bits, and carried it as she had seen them do. It did not seem to help, but she liked swinging it at overhanging tree limbs to shake down pine cones and acorns.
People were pleasant to her, and this was also new. This was far from the capital, so most passersby were peasants and countryfolk, with none of the fixed stare and polite inattention of the city-dweller. And, for the first time, she noticed the strange things they carried everywhere, and knew what they were, which had not been the case when she was still simply a cat. When she was near the ocean (and as the days passed, the Tkaid spent much time within sight of the ocean, generally a sullen eleventh-month gray), she saw men carrying over their shoulders fishing nets caught up on long poles that snagged in branches overhead if they were not careful, or strings of dried cod, or flat baskets filled with mackerel strips. Once she saw a man who led a black ox with wheat straw loaded across its shoulders in a pile so tall that it dwarfed the ox. A dog slept on top of the straw, and did not notice her.
There was a night, when she was in Owari province. The moon was new, and the nights were very dark. She was tired of sleeping wet, and eating cold food she couldn’t see properly, and so when the light dimmed with dusk, she looked for a place to stay. A path left the Tkaid, and trailed north toward a hulking blackness capped with a dim luminous triangle, high up: firelight and smoke through an eave opening. Frosted grasses closed over the path, and she had to feel her way through, listening to them slide against her skirts. Another disadvantage: she missed her fur sometimes.
A dog barked. She stopped until it came up to her, yelling, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and then it, too, froze.
They eyed one another in the near-dark, the woman who was a cat and the little dust-colored bitch. “Why,” the tortoiseshell woman said, “you’re no taller than my knee.”
“You’re—what are you?” the dog asked.
“Bigger than you,” she said, and threw her stick at it. The dog tumbled backward into the grasses and vanished, and she did not see it again that night.
She continued to the farm. She looked around: there were a number of buildings, and she could tell what some were simply by their smells: a barn, a food-storage house, a granary. Everywhere were spaces into which she might have crawled had she still been a cat, all too small and unwelcoming for a woman. She stood indecisively in the farmyard’s center.
“Hey,” a voice called. The tortoiseshell woman spun and dropped into a fighting crouch: ready.
“Easy, easy, now,” the voice said, comfort and laughter in its tone. She saw its owner: a man, barely more than an outline under the farmhouse’s eaves. “I mean no harm, miss. This is my farm, is all. My wife here, she’ll want to invite you in. Yukio?” he called into the farmhouse. “Come on out here.”
A wood door slid open, and a woman stepped out, outlined in the dim light from inside the building. “Where—” she said, looking around. “Oh, there you are, husband. And miss. Come in, stay the night. We don’t have much to eat, but you’re welcome to it, such as it is. You shouldn’t be out at this time of night. Wolves; other things.”
The tortoiseshell woman took a step forward, then another. It is not an easy thing for a cat to trust people. They keep their own counsel even in the best of circumstances, when they are cherished pets (indeed, Myb, who pats at my damp ink stick as I write, has clawed two women I asked to take her away, and refuses even my touch); how much harder it must be for one who had never felt a gentle person’s hand. She might not have come in at all, but the wife gestured. “Come on up here, where I can see you.”
The tortoiseshell woman stepped through the sliding door onto the dirt packed hard as stone that floored half the house. She slipped off her clogs (another thing she knew without knowing) and stepped up onto the boxwood floor of the raised section, following the couple to the square hearth pit. Mats were clustered here, and trays crammed with little metal bowls.
Here she learned one of her first lessons about people: “not much to eat” is a matter of opinion. As a cat, she had lived on whatever animals and insects (and, to be plain, garbage) were most easily captured or found, which had necessarily limited her options; as a woman her options had not broadened much. But the farmer and his family were not constrained. They grew many things and traded for others. It was autumn, so there was much to eat, and she tried it all: cooked rice with sweet vinegar and beans, and fresh and salted fish, a soup made of sweet potatoes and gromwell, little pickled quails’ eggs, dried slices from a pungent orange melon, and preserved plums so sour-salty that her eyes watered after the first tiny bite.
The three of them ate together on the polished floor that surrounded the hearth pit. On the other side of a wall that lost itself in the shadows of the immense eaves were laughs and conversation from the two servants.
We—people—may not always recognize the feeling, but we can tell when a thing is not right. We walk into a room and know immediately that something has changed, though it may be days before we realize that it is the eye-blinds have been replaced. The farmer and his wife knew that the tortoiseshell woman was not what she seemed, even though they could not have told you precisely what she seemed to be. She was no peasant. She might have been a noblewoman—the weave of her robes was very fine—but her hair was chopped short as a nun’s or a servant’s. She might have been a nun, but she did not wear the drab grays that would be correct, and she neither begged nor offered prayers; if she were a wealthy nun, she had no servants. If she were running away from home, she would be attended by the lover who had talked her into eloping. That left only two possible explanations for her presence.
“Are you on pilgrimage?” the farmer asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“Then you must be selling something,” he said with total assurance. “What is it?”
“Sharpness,” she said, listening to herself with surprise. “Claws and teeth.”
“Needles?” his wife asked, as if she’d heard different words. “I need one. Mine is bent.”
“I don’t—”
“They’d be in your pack, yes?” the wife said. “May I get it for you?” She stood and crossed to the sliding door, and gathered up something that had been there. It was a footed wicker box with straps so that one could carry it over the shoulder, like the packs the monks carry.
The tortoiseshell woman frowned. “This is not mine.”
“Of course it is,” the wife said. “We saw you bring it here. You put it right there when you came in, along with your cloak and other things.”
The tortoiseshell woman opened the basket. Inside were bundles of various sizes. She unwrapped the first: a handful of needles pinned to a scrap of the indigo cloth that peasants use for everything, rolled tight to protect them. She handed this to the wife, who oohed over their sharpness, the lack of rust. There was a larger lumpy bundle of oiled cotton, as well. She unrolled it on the floor, and found wrapped in rabbit-patterned silk nineteen knives.
“Those are nice,” the farmer said. “What do you want for them?”
The knives were each precisely as long as her palm, each identical to the one in her belt. “I—cannot trade these,”
she said, looking at them.
The farmer shrugged. “Someone else wants them, eh? It’s a pity, they look good and sharp.” But despite the fact that she had nothing to give him, he gave her a cloth filled with goose meat and rice balls.
They slept soon after that, and she was nearly asleep when she heard the farmer’s wife whisper: “My lady? Men, they see little, but you are more than a seller of needles, or even a flighty girl running away from home. Who and what are you?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, honestly but warily, remembering the last time she’d answered this question, for the black cat who had attacked her. “No one.”
“No one is no one,” the farmer’s wife said. But nothing else happened, and when she went her way at dawn the next morning, the farmer’s wife said nothing of this.
I try to write of the common people, but, really, what do I know? I have never met any. I have never slept in their homes, eaten their food. Even my servants are of good family, elegant and civilized women all. I imagine what their lives must be like, yet my imaginings are necessarily naïve. But what else do I have? Is it better to write and think only of what I have myself experienced? Most monogatari tales are about what their authors already know: life as a court noblewoman, the mannered round of exchanged poems and misunderstood intentions. I am intimately familiar with this world: I was born for it, and have lived at court for fifty years. And here, where I tell the tale of the cat who became a woman, I confess frankly that much of my life bored me senseless.
I have watched the full moon many times, crossing the same arch of sky between the same mountains to east and west, lighting gardens that were nearly interchangeable: here the three lakes, there the stand of reeds and iris, the pagoda from China, the perfect little bridge. Yes, it is always beautiful, each month’s moon unique. But all my life I longed to see a place where the eye was drawn, not by delicate nuances in oh, so familiar sights but by utter newness, by a blow to the mind. Perhaps this is why I write a tale now, something so foreign to my experience—because in doing so I am for a minute or a month freed from my life.
I have traveled as much as was allowed. I have gone as far north as Funaoka hill, and been on pilgrimage as far away as Ise, Hase, Yoshino mountain, two days’ travel and more from the capital. I even saw the moon rise over the ocean once. But every night the tortoiseshell woman sleeps under a new sky and a new moon. She has lost everything, and still I envy her from the bottom of my heart.
4. The Butterfly-Printed Notebook
In the morning it was raining. The wicker pack was still there, and so she shrugged into its straps. There was also a basket-hat, deep enough to conceal her face, with a trailing veil of ivory gauze. She had not had this the day before; but she took it without comment, along with the walking-stick beside them.
She crossed the border to Mikawa province, and stopped to eat her goose meat and rice. Her hands were cold and clumsy (a mixed advantage: fingers were better than paws had been, but then paws had never felt cold, even in the rainiest weather. Still, she was young and had not lived through her first winter; she did not know the numbness that snow brings to even the most leathery of pads) and she dropped several of the rice balls. She was not a lover of rice, so she left them where they lay, hoping some edible animal would find them and grow fat and slow, ready for her should she ever return this way.
There were few people on the Tkaid that day. No one traveled for pleasure, and even men who must travel—for pilgrimage or with news from the provinces for the capital—find there are days when they cannot quite bring themselves to hustle about. Such a day as this—cold, wet, and monotonous—encouraged a certain lack of discipline, and everyone who could stayed inside. But the tortoiseshell woman did not travel for pleasure or because she was required to, by gods or man. She traveled because there was no reason not to, because her misery was independent of weather, and so she moved on.
That evening it was still raining, steadily and everywhere, so she stopped in an abandoned roadside temple. (She slept much at shrines and temples: they were near the road, and they did not require her to talk with people, which became fatiguing sometimes, with their interminable chat about families.) There were no priests or monks, and not even a statue to show to which of the ten thousand Buddhas and saints the temple had been holy. All that was left was a bell the color of verdigris, its silver tassels tarnished and frayed; fading vermilion paint on the beams; and empty stone pedestals: the ghosts of Buddhas. The little stones once heaped before the statues were still here, scattered to the temple’s corners. With each step the tortoiseshell woman kicked aside now-purposeless pebbles. The roof was more cracks than shingles. Water fell through everywhere.
Using wood she broke from a ruined screen, she started a fire on the largest pedestal. Her wicker pack held many things, it seemed, though she only found them when she needed them; one was an oiled deerskin bag with a flint, and a bundle of dust-dry grass. The fire was small but bright, for the wood had been resinous. It spat colored sparks, and hissed when rain fell into it. Smoke seeped upward and let itself out at the cracks in the roof. She shook her cloak dry, and was soon warm again.
I cannot say quite how it was, but she was still a cat in some ways. Her robes never got as wet as they would have on a person, as if they were fur and she could shake and then groom herself dry whenever she wished. She did not know that this was not normal for people, and so she never thought of it. But I do. I have taken everything else from her: home, family, story. I know some of where she goes, into winter and conflict and more loss. And I find that I cannot make her physically miserable, as well: not tonight as she huddles in an unfamiliar body, anyway. We—the gods who create things, even we small gods who write monogatari tales—find that there are limits to our cruelty.
She ate the last of her food from the farmer, and curled up in her cloak to sleep.
She was dozing when something bit her hand. She killed it without waking up fully, and only after it was dead did she look at the little creature. It was small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, fat, and the dead-white of rice or ghosts. When she turned it over, she saw that it had either no legs or myriad tiny legs, though she couldn’t tell which in the dim light of the dying fire. She felt another bite, on her ankle, and slapped at it, killing another of the little things. She was ready for the third one, and caught it between her hands when it sank its teeth into her calf. “Stop that!” she said.
The thing squirmed. “Let me go!”
She felt it trying to bite her fingers, so she shook it and then cracked a little opening to look inside. It was like the others, small and white; when she looked around, she saw several more, just out of the firelight. “Stay back, or I’ll squash this one.” She flattened her hands a little, and the others squirmed back into the darkness.
She returned her attention to her catch, which lay rigidly still in her hands. “What are you? Killing animal, prey, something else?”
“I am a rice ball,” it said with a certain pride.
It did look a bit like one, though.—“Rice balls don’t talk, or move. Or bite me,” she added as it tried to do so, and she closed her hands and shook it again.
“I’m not just a rice ball,” it said when it could talk again. “I am one of your rice balls. You dropped us. Remember?”
“You weren’t alive then.”
“You abandoned us,” it said, full of a sense of ill-usage. “Bad enough that you eat my brethren; bad enough that my destiny is to be eaten, but then you don’t even do that! You drop me on the ground, where mice or foxes will find me. Wasted!”
“Hey,” she said, and shook the rice ball again. “I said something: you weren’t alive when I dropped you. What happened?”
“How do I know?” the rice ball snapped. “How do you know, for that matter? Maybe we were alive, and you were just too much of a clod to notice.”
She considered the rice ball. This was the first time that something she might eat had ever spoken to her.
Prey animals didn’t have souls and could not speak—her mother had taught her this, and it must be true.
“You have a soul?” she asked dubiously.
The rice ball said, “Why do you care?”
“If you do, then perhaps mice and rats and all the other prey animals have souls as well. I’m curious.”
“Would that stop you eating them?”
“No,” she said honestly. “Not if I can catch them.” (Cats are like that.) “But it might make things a little more difficult.”
“Why?” said the rice ball. “Life is all about eating and being eaten.”
“I suppose,” she said. “What do rice balls eat, then?”
It was an unanswerable question, and so it tried to bite her again. She popped it in her mouth and bit down. There was a single squeak, and her mouth was filled with cold sticky rice. The other creatures rolled to her feet, their life gone: no more than rice balls now. After eating two more (for she was hungry), she pushed the rest into the fire. I cannot say whether this was a touching attempt to offer them a Buddhist cremation, or whether she was making sure they would not come back to life and harass her in her sleep. Perhaps she meant both these things. It is seldom that our motives are uncomplicated.
“Perhaps now you are willing to listen,” the road said.