I Am A Cat (Tuttle Classics)

by Natsume Sōseki

Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.

Miss Blanche, having given through her tears a complete account of this event, assured me that, to maintain our own parental love and to enjoy our beautiful family life, we, the cat-race, must engage in total war upon all humans. We have no choice but to exterminate them. I think it is a very reasonable proposition.

I feel that life is not unreasonable so long as one can scrape along from day to day. For surely even human beings will not flourish forever. I think it best to wait in patience for the Day of the Cats.

“Do you know it’s quite difficult? When one sees someone else painting, it looks easy enough; but not till one takes a brush oneself, does one realize just how difficult it is.” So said my noble master, and it was true enough.

“It’s only natural that one cannot paint particularly well the moment one starts.

The prime fact is that all humans are puffed up by their extreme self-satisfaction with their own brute power. Unless some creatures more powerful than humans arrive on earth to bully them, there’s just no knowing to what dire lengths their fool presumptuousness will eventually carry them.

A house, however big it is, won’t help fill an empty belly.”

In the whole wide world there’s no creature more brazen-faced than a human being.

The plain fact is that humans, one and all, are merely thieves at heart.”

Living in a teacher’s house, it seems that even a cat acquires the character of teachers. I’d best watch out lest, one of these days, I, too, become dyspeptic.

And men who accept the burdens of regret, whether in respect of watercolors or of anything else, are not the stuff that men of the world are made of.

He does not even understand that love can never grow unless there is at least a complete and mutual understanding.

I don’t see why he should single me out as an example of plain features. If I went to a barber and had my face shaved, I wouldn’t look much different from a human. But, there you are, humans are conceited and that’s the trouble with them.

Compared with such complexities, cats are truly simple. If we want to eat, we eat; if we want to sleep, we sleep; when we are angry, we are angry utterly; when we cry, we cry with all the desperation of extreme commitment to our grief.

No doubt human beings like my two-faced master find it necessary to keep diaries in order to display in a darkened room that true character so assiduously hidden from the world. But among cats both our four main occupations (walking, standing, sitting, and lying down) and such incidental activities as excreting waste are pursued quite openly. We live our diaries, and consequently have no need to keep a daily record as a means of maintaining our real characters. Had I the time to keep a diary, I’d use that time to better effect; sleeping on the veranda.

At this point, though a mere cat, I perceived a truth: that golden opportunity makes all animals venture to do even those things they do not want to do.

In the middle of this anguish I found my second truth: that all animals can tell by instinct what is or is not good for them.

It was then that the fourth enlightenment burst upon me: that all comfort

Though I am undoubtedly a cat, I possess a wide general knowledge of the nature of compassion and am deeply sensitive to affection, kind-heartedness, tenderness, and love.

“A happy New Year, Mr. Blacky. You do look well, as usual.” And I lift up my tail and twist it to the left. Blacky, keeping his tail straight up, refused to return my salutation. “What! Happy? If the New Year’s happy, then you should be out of your tiny mind the whole year round. Now push off sharp, you back-end of a bellows.”

I calmly let him go on stroking me, justifying my compliance with the reflection that so small a weakness is permissible when there are those in the world who admit to thinking themselves under loving observation by persons who merely happen to be cross-eyed.

If this were considered a success, even for a first meeting, what would failure have been like?

as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss.

but if one cannot die without going through that kind of agony, I frankly would not care to die on anyone’s behalf.

Nowadays I haven’t even energy to go out. Somehow life seems weary. I have become as indolent a cat as my master is an indolent human. I have come to understand that it is only natural that people should so often explain my master’s self-immurement in his study as the result of a love affair gone wrong.

The more that humans show me sympathy, the more I am inclined to forget that I am a cat. Feeling that I am now closer to humans than to cats, the idea of rallying my own race in an effort to wrest supremacy from the bipeds no longer has the least appeal. Moreover, I have developed, indeed evolved, to such an extent that there are now times when I think of myself as just another human in the human world; which I find very encouraging. It is not that I look down on my own race, but it is no more than natural to feel most at ease among those whose attitudes are similar to one’s own. I would consequently feel somewhat piqued if my growing penchant for mankind were stigmatized as fickleness or flippancy or treachery.

“he is a little eccentric, but any man who pursues learning tends to get like that.”

I carry not only the power of God, Buddha, Confucius, Love, and even Death, but also an infallible panacea for all ills that could bewitch the entire human race.

At this point, I become so impressed by my own powers and so conscious of the reverence I consequently owe to my own most precious tail that I feel unable to withhold immediate recognition of its divinity.

If whiskers establish sauciness, every cat is impudent.

For anything to be regular suggests that the thing’s all right, but regularity can be so utterly regular as to become, by its very ulteriority, mediocre and of no account, which is extremely pitiable.

As I see it, persons of some small education tend to grow conceited and, if they happen also to be poor, their characters become as bitter as sour grapes. Indeed, some people in that condition turn truly quite absurd. For no reason at all, they flare up at persons of wealth as if unconscious of their own total ineffectiveness. It’s quite astonishing how they behave; as if the rich had robbed them personally of things they never owned.”The

“You’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s nothing one can do when a man tells lies for a hobby.”

“If you think I’m deformed, why did you marry me? It was you who wanted the marriage, yet now you call me deformed. . .” “For the simple reason that I didn’t know. Indeed, I was unaware of your condition until this very day. If you want to make an issue of it, why didn’t you reveal your naked scalp to me before we got married?” “What a silly thing to say! Where in the world would you find a place where girls had to have their scalps examined before they could get married?”

“Don’t be so daft. If anyone’s entitled to a grudge, it’s me.”

The fault lay in your memory, not in your will.

The prizes awarded at Greek contests were worth more than the performances that earned them, for the prizes were intended not only to stimulate effort but to reward achievement. Consequently, if one were to give a prize for intellectual prowess, for knowledge itself, one would have to find something to award which was more valuable than knowledge. But knowledge already is the rarest gem in the world.

whatever the color of your money, it is worthless stuff compared with learning.

Reader to start comparing himself with world-famous professors is like a minnow demanding to be treated as a whale.

She neither apologizes nor attempts to break the habit, just stubbornly insists that she doesn’t remember ever having done such a thing. Since she does it in her sleep, it’s probably true that she doesn’t remember doing it. But facts, remembered or not, are all, alas, still facts.

There are persons in this world who, having perpetrated villainies, remain assured of their own absolute saintliness. They really do convince themselves that they’re pure of any guilt. Such utter self-deception is, I dare say, a form of simple-mindedness, but however genuine the self-deception, if the actuality is objectionable to other people it should be put down.

I suffered agonies. Nevertheless, I persisted.

From time immemorial God has been worshiped as omniscient and omnipotent. In particular, the Christian God, at least up until the twentieth century, was honored for his alleged possession of those qualities. However, that alleged omniscience and omnipotence could well be regarded by the ordinary man in the street as, in fact, their precise opposites: nescience and impotence. I believe that, not since the world was first created, has anyone preceded me in identifying this extraordinary paradox.

I am informed that God created all things in this universe, from which it must follow that God created men. In fact, I am advised that this proposition is specifically stated as a fundamental truth in some fat book which human beings call the Bible. Now, mankind has been engaged for several thousands of years in the accumulation of human observations about the facts of humanity. From which mass of data one particular fact has emerged which not only causes human beings to wonder at and admire themselves, but also inclines them to acquire ever-deepening credence in the omniscience and omnipotence of God.

The particular fact in question is the fact that, although mankind now teems upon this earth, no two human creatures have identical faces. The constituents of the human face are, of course, fixed: two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth. Further, the general dimensions of those constituent items are, more or less, the same. Nevertheless, though the myriads of human faces are thus all constructed from the same basic materials, all the final products differ from each other. The human reaction to this state of affairs is not only to rejoice in how bloody marvelous it is that each and every one of them commands an individuality of appearance, but also to admire the miraculous skill of the Creator who, using such simple and uniform materials, has yet produced such an infinite variety of result. For surely only a power of infinite originality of imagination could have created such almost incredible diversity. Even the greatest of painters cannot produce, however strenuously he exerts himself in pursuit of variety, more than twelve or thirteen individual masterpieces. So it is natural that mankind should marvel at God’s astonishing and singlehanded achievement in the production of people.

Since such a protean creativity cannot be matched by men as themselves creators, inevitably they regard the process as a manifestation of divinity and, in particular, of divine omnipotence. For which reasons human beings stand in endless awe of God, and, of course, considered ...

However, considered from the feline viewpoint, the same facts lead to the opposite conclusion: that God, if not entirely impotent, is at least of limited ability, even incompetent. Certainly of no greater creative capability than muddle-headed man. God is supposed to have created, of intent, as many faces as there are people. But surely one cannot just dismiss the possibility that, in fact, he lacked sureness of touch; that, though he originally intended to create every man-jack of mankind with the same face, he found the task impossible, and that he consequently produced so long a string of botched appearances as to end up with the present disorderly state of the human physiognomy. Thus the variformity of the human face can equally well be regarded either as a demonstration of God’s success or as ev...

Consider human eyes. They are embedded in pairs within a flat surface and their owners, therefore, cannot simultaneously see to both their left and right. It is regrettable, but only one side of any object can, at any one time, enter their field of vision. Being thus incapable of seeing in the round, even the daily happenings of life in his own society, it is perhaps not surprising that man should get so excited about certain one...

Any creature capable of seeing things whole must recognize that, if it is difficult to create infinite variation, it is equally dif...

Consider, too, the nature of language-learning. Human beings learn their various tongues purely by imitation. They reproduce, without any display of initiative or inventiveness, the noises made by the daily mouthings of their mothers, nurses, and whomsoever else they may happen to hear. To the best of their ability, they imitate. Nevertheless, in the course of one or two decades, the languages thus produced by imitation show distinct changes in pronunciation. Which amply demonstrates the human inability to make perfect imitations. Exact imitation is extremely difficult to achieve.