I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki

Author:Natsume Sōseki
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Satire, Japanese Literature, Humour
ISBN: 9781462901753
Publisher: Tuttle Pub
Published: 1969-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VOLUME III

I

WHEN I WAS describing my fence trotting exercises, I must have mentioned that bamboo fence which encloses my master’s garden. Beyond that fence to the south of us there is another dwelling, but it would be an error to assume that our neighbors are just anybody. Admittedly, it is a low-rent area, but Mr. Sneaze is a person of some standing, and certainly not the sort of man to establish chatty relationships across a backyard fence with any old Tom, Dick, or Harry. On the other side of our particular fence there is an open space about thirty feet deep at the far end, in which stands a dark green row of five or six heavily foliaged cypresses. If one looks at this scene from our veranda, the impression it creates is of a deep and thickly wooded forest, and one feels that here is a lonely house in a glade where some learned sage, indifferent to fame, and wealth, leads out his solitary life with only a nameless cat for his companion. However, the cypresses do not, in fact, grow quite as thickly as I’d like to make out, for through their greenery one can, with hurtful clarity, descry the undistinguished roof of a cheap boarding house of which the only redeeming feature is its soul-astounding name: Crane Flock Manor. You will appreciate that it consequently takes a real effort of the imagination to fit my master as I’ve hitherto described him into such a high-falutin’ background. Yet, if that crumby boarding house can bear so grand a name, then surely my master’s home deserves at least to be known as the Cave of the Sleeping Dragon. Since there’s no tax on house names, one might as well select a name which sounds impressive. Anyway, this open space to the south of us, of a north-south depth of some thirty feet, extends on an east-west axis for about sixty feet along our bamboo fence, and then turns at a right angle northward to run along the eastern side of the Cave of the Sleeping Dragon. Now it is in this northern area that trouble has arisen.

One might dare boast that this open space, stretching as it does around two whole sides of our dwelling, is big enough to please anyone, but in point of fact not only the master of the house but even I, the dragon’s resident sacred cat, are often at our wits’ end to know what to do with so much emptiness. Just as the cypress trees lord it to the south, so to the north the scene is dominated by some seven or eight paulownias standing in a row. Since those trees have each now grown to be a good twelve inches around, one could make a pretty packet by selling their highly fancied wood to the first clog-maker whom one pared to call in. Unfortunately, even if my unworldly dragon could rise to such an idea, being no more than a tenant of his cavern, he couldn’t put it into practice.

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