I Am A Cat (Tuttle Classics)

by Natsume Sōseki

Now if God had shown himself able to create human beings indistinguishable from each other, that would have been impressive.

I must confess that I have now forgotten why I embarked upon this digression. However, since similar forgetfulness is common among mankind, I trust such a lapse will be found pardonable in a cat.

Indeed a God so deft as to be able to produce this startling likeness cannot possibly be regarded as incompetent.

“It’s bad for the health to study as hard as he does. Today’s a Sunday, and Sundays don’t come every day of the week. Now do they?”

The longer one lives in this wicked world, the more one learns. It is always good to learn, but as one accumulates knowledge of the world’s wickedness, one grows ever the more cautious, ever the more prepared for the worst. Artfulness, uncharitableness, self-defensive wariness: these are the fruits of worldly learning. The penalty of age is this rather ugly knowingness. Which would seem to explain why one never finds among the old a single decent person. They know too much to see things straight, to feel things cleanly, to act without compromise.

“Indeed, the thief was stupid, but his victim wasn’t exactly clever.”

“He dislikes everything,” says Mrs. Sneaze. “Well, anyway I’m sure he doesn’t dislike his wife.” Tatara makes an unexpected sally. “I dislike her most of all.” My master’s comment is extremely terse. Mrs. Sneaze turns slightly away and her face stiffens, but she then looks back at her husband and says, as if she thought she were getting a good dig in at him, “I suppose you’ll be saying next that you dislike living.” “True,” came his off-hand answer, taking the wind clean out of her sails, “I don’t like living much.” He’s way past praying for.

But what’s so foolish about being well educated?”

Philistines such as he, creatures responsive only to the crudest material phenomena, cannot appreciate anything deeper than the surface appearances recorded by their five coarse senses. Unless one is rigged out in a navvy’s clobber and the sweat can be seen and smelt as it pours from one’s brow and armpits, such persons can’t conceive that one is working.

It’s a waste of effort to try and force those incapable of seeing more than outer forms to understand the inner brilliance of their own souls.

As the proverb says, “The rich man’s son is never seated at the edge of the raised hall.” I, too, am far too precious to be exposed to the danger of a tumble into calamity.

I sometimes hear them say, when they have the good fortune to make my acquaintance, how nice and easy life could be if one lived it like a cat. If they really want their lives to be nice and easy, it’s already in their own good power to make them so. Nothing stands in the way. Nobody insists that they should fuss about as they do. It is entirely of their own free will that they make more engagements than they can possibly keep and then complain about being so horribly busy.

Men who build themselves red-hot fires shouldn’t complain of the heat.

“Crabs walk sideways but this year’s weather walks backward. Maybe it’s trying to teach us the truth of that Chinese saying that sometimes it is reasonable to act contrary to reason.”

“In the last ten years the world of poetry has advanced and altered out of all recognition. Modern poetry is not easy. You can’t understand it if you do no more than glance through it in bed or while you’re waiting at a railway station. More often than not, modern poets are unable to answer even the simplest questions about their own work. Such poets write by direct inspiration, and are not to be held responsible for more than the writing. Annotation, critical commentary, and exegesis, all these may be left to the scholars. We poets are not to be bothered with such trivia.

took great pains with the construction of this work, and I would like in particular to draw your attention to my telling contrast of this bitter world with the sweetness of a kiss.” “The pains you must have taken,” says my master somewhat ambiguously, “have not gone unremarked.”

It was not until recently that human beings, previously content to regard eating and sleeping as their only purposes in life, began to grasp the point of taking exercise. Let all mankind remember in what self-complacent idleness they used to pass their days; how passionately they once believed that impassivity of mind and body were the signs of a noble soul, and that the honor of a nobleman resided in his ability to do nothing more strenuous than to plant his bum on a cushion that there it might, in comfort, rot away.

It is only recently that, like some infectious disease brought from the West to this pure land of the gods, a stream of silly injunctions has been sprayed upon us to take exercise, to gulp milk, to shower ourselves with freezing water, to plonk ourselves in the sea, and, in the summertime, to sequester ourselves in the mountains on a diet, allegedly healthy, of nothing more solid than mist.

Nevertheless, one may fairly equate a cat’s one year, with ten for human beings: and though our span of life is two or three times shorter than theirs, a cat may still therein achieve full feline self-development. It follows that any evaluation of a cat’s life and a man’s life by reference to a common time-scale must result in grievous error.

The world’s evaluations of an individual’s social worth, like the slits in my eyeballs, change with time and circumstance.

Indeed, man’s natural proclivity for this kind of investigation is the sole characteristic by which he is superior to a cat. Which is, of course, precisely the reason that human beings, proud of their singularity, attach so much importance to such pettifogging points. Consequently, if men can’t offer an immediate answer, I suggest that for all our sakes they think the matter over very carefully.

What psychological pressure induces this incontinence at the moment immediately prior to an act of aviation? Is it, perhaps, that the thought of flying is too unbearable to bear? Or is it simply that a pissed-on prowler is so shockedly surprised that his intended prey gains ample time to escape?

It were better to give up than to persist in a dialogue with dunces,

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 ...

“ye shall love one another for so long as it serves thine individual interest.”

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.

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.

If by mutual agreement all men were to become monsters, obviously none would see anything monstrous in the others.

“Nothing’s much fun anymore when you get to be old like me. Once one gets decrepit, one can’t keep up with the youngsters.

he is poised at the verge of his return to worldliness, to the sad mundanities of man, to the suavities of compromise, the specious words, and the accommodating practices of his species in society. If, on the verge of returning to that world, he yet maintains so brute an obstinacy, surely his mokelike stubbornness must be a deep-rooted disease; a disease, indeed, so very firmly rooted as to be virtually ineradicable.

My master loves being ill, but he would very much hate to die. He welters in hypochondriacal orgies of self-pity, but lacks the strength of soul to seriously look on death. Consequently, if anyone scares him with the news that some continued illness must Iead to his demise, my craven master will immediately be both terrified out of his wits and, as I see it, terrified also into the best of health. Only the terror of death by dismissal can shrivel the roots of his almost ineradicable stubbornness. And if dismissal doesn’t do the trick, well then, that, I’m afraid, is that, and the poor old perisher will perish.

Still, in all, that foolish, fond old man, sick or well, remains my master. It was he who in my kittenhood took me in and fed me. I recall the tale of the Chinese poet who, given a meal when starving, later repaid that debt by saving his benefactor’s life, and I consider it should not be impossible for a cat at least to be moved by his master’s fate.

As always, one cannot understand the present situation without tracing its development back to causes rooted in the ancient past. Since even doctors cannot prescribe cures unless they first have diagnosed the causes of disorder,

I think it fair to add that these short-term maniacs, these inspired idiots, appear to be extraordinarily difficult to produce. It is painfully easy to manufacture lifelong loonies, but even the most artful God seems to have trouble fashioning beings whose manic spells are limited to those periods during which the lunatic is holding a means to write and is confronted with blank paper. In any event, God seldom creates such specimens. Consequently, they have to be manufactured without divine assistance, and all down the ages, scholars have been obliged to devote as much time and effort to finding the best way to generate the flow of inspiration as they have to the problems of preventing rushes of blood to the head. One seeker after inspiration, convinced that the secret of its attainment lay in constipation, assiduously strove for that prior condition by eating a dozen unripe persimmons every day for fruitless years on end.

We know from Newton’s First Law of Motion that a body remains in its state of rest or of uniform motion unless acted upon by some external force. If the movement of matter were governed only by that law, my master’s skull would at this very moment be sharing the fate of Aeschylus, so he was fortunate that Newton was kind enough to save him from such a shattering experience by the establishment of a Second Law to the effect that change in motion is proportional to, and in the same direction as, the applied force.

he laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he laughed himself to death.” “Well, that’s certainly a very funny story, but I’m not suggesting you should laugh your life away. But laugh a little, moderately, a little more than you do, and you’ll find you feel wonderful.”

A man with jagged edges is permanently handicapped: he can never roll smoothly along in this rough world. Anything rounded and easy going can easily go anywhere, but angular things not only find it hard to roll but, when they do roll, get their corners snagged and chipped and blunted, which hurts. You see, old chap, the world’s not made simply and solely for you. You can’t always have things your way. In a nutshell, it doesn’t pay to defy the wealthy. All you’ll achieve are strained nerves, damaged health, and an ill name from everyone. Whatever you do and however much you suffer, those with money won’t care a damn. All they have to do is to sit back and hire others to work for them, including whatever dirty work they happen to want done. It’s obvious that you can’t stand up to people like that. Dogged adherence to high moral principle is all very well in its way, but it seems to me that the price you might have to pay, indeed the price you are apparently paying, is a total disruption of both your private studies and your daily employment. You’ll finish up completely worn out for no gain whatsoever.”

“There’s nothing wrong with grumbling. When you feel like grumbling, grumble away. At least it brings one interim relief. You see, everyone is different. You can’t refashion others to be like you. Consider chopsticks and bread: you’ve got to hold chopsticks as everyone does or you’ll find it hard to eat rice; however, bread can be cut, and is best cut, in accordance with your own particular liking. A suit made by a good tailor fits like a glove from the moment you put it on, but something run up by a shoddy craftsman takes years of tiresome wearing before it adjusts itself to your own particular bone structure. If competent parents produced children all neatly shaped to fit the ways of our present world, all would be happily well. But if you have the misfortune to be born bungled, your only choice is either to suffer as a misfit or to hang on grimly until the world so changes its shape as to suit yours.” “I see no prospect that I shall ever fit in. It’s a depressing prospect.” “If one forces one’s way into a suit too small for one’s body, of course one tears the stitchings, by which I mean that persons violently ill suited to the world they seek to inhabit are those who pick quarrels, commit suicide, even incite real riots. But you, to be frank, are merely discontented. You’re not going to do yourself in and you’re not a natural brawler. You could be a lot worse off than you are.”

Nobody, however mighty, can do as he likes with the world. None can stop the sun from setting, none reverse the flow of rivers. But any man is able to do as he likes with his own mind.

And our last visitor had made it very clear that in his remarkable view that a man can only attain to peace of mind by training himself to be passive. It remains for my master to decide which course of action or inaction he wishes to follow.

All studies undertaken by human beings are always studies of themselves. The proper study of mankind is self. The heavens, earth, the mountains and the rivers, sun and moon and stars—they are all no more than other names for the self. There is nothing a man can study which is not, in the end, the study of the self. If a man could jump out of his self that self would disappear at the moment of his jumping. Nor is that all. Only oneself can study one’s self. It is totally impossible for anyone else to do it.

Totally impossible, no matter how earnestly one may wish either to study another or to be studied by another. Which explains why all great men invariably achieve greatness solely by their own efforts. If it were true that you could learn to understand yourself by virtue of someone else’s helping effort, then you could, for instance, declare whether some hunk of meat were tough or tender by getting someone else to eat it for you.

If your own self exists, it is your personal phantom, a kind of doppelganger. Indeed, it’s often the case that a phantom has more substance than a soulless person.

A mirror is a vat for brewing self-conceit, yet, at the same time, a means to neutralize all vanity. Nothing shows up the absurd pretensions of a show-off more incitingly than a mirror. Since time began, the pretentious and the vainglorious have gone about the world inflicting damage both upon themselves and upon others, and the first cause of at least two-thirds of that injury undoubtedly lay in mirrors.

Recognition of the loathliness of one’s face often proves a first step forward toward realizing the depravity of one’s soul.

Your closest friend might betray you. Your very parents might turn cold toward you. Even your own true love might cast you off. No man, naturally, can put his trust in wealth or worldly honors. Lands and peerages can vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Even a lifetime’s scholarship treasured in one’s head goes moldy in the end. On what, then, Dr. Sneaze, do you intend to rely? What is there in the whole, wide universe on which you dare depend? God? God is a mere clay figure fabricated in the depths of their despair by dreggy persons, by beings themselves so terrified as to be nothing more than stinking lumps of shit.

When due regard is given to other people but those other people do not reciprocate, then, instead of just complaining, the discontented are liable, every now and again, to seek redress of their grievance by some positive action. Such spasmodic action is called revolution. Revolutions are not the work of mere grumblers, but are the happy handiwork of high-ranking and distinguished persons who enjoy promoting them.

“I haven’t got the time. Just because you, uncle, live in a leisurely style, you shouldn’t assume that others can afford to fritter their hours away.”