I Am A Cat (Tuttle Classics)

by Natsume Sōseki

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 such times I visit this fair, lady friend of mine and our conversation ranges over many things. Then, before I am aware of it, I find myself refreshed. I forget my worries, hardships, everything. I feel as if reborn. Female influence is indeed a most potent thing.

won’t expand upon the meaning of my use of “usual,” which is merely a word expressing the square of “often.” What one does once, one wants to do again, and things tried twice invite a third experience.

That house is my tobacco.

There is something peculiarly moving about the faint illumination of a night-lamp in the dark hours of the spring. Over the unpretentious, but sadly inelegant interior-scene of our dwelling, it casts a flickering radiance so sweet and gentle that it seems to be inviting our gladdest marvelment at the beauty of this night.

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.

My master loves being ill, but he would very much hate to die.

Of all the tribulations in this world, boredom is the one most hard to bear.

bored feudal lords who neither understood nor cared about the fellings of other people, a group which is nowadays best represented by boys so infantile, so mentally stunted, that, while having no time to think of anything but their own fool pleasures, they have insufficient intelligence to see how, even in that sub-puerile pursuit, best to employ their vitality.

It is of course true that the human creature characteristically prides itself on its self-reliance. However, it would be more exact to say that the creature, knowing it can’t rely upon itself, would very much like to believe that it could and is consequently never at ease with itself until it can give a practical demonstration to some other such creature of how much it can rely upon itself. What’s more, those endowed with

the least intelligence and those least sure of themselves are precisely those who seize upon the slightest opportunity to demonstrate their entitlement to some sort of certificate of prowess.

It would be disrespectful to compare a school teacher with a monkey in the Asakusa Zoo, disrespectful, that is, not to monkeys but to teachers.

Now, though teachers are not actually kept on chains, they are very effectively shackled by their salaries. They can be teased in perfect safety.

must, however, first observe that any major event is invariably preceded by a series of minor happenings, tremors and smoke puffs clearly indicative of the coming explosion,

The progressive positivism of Western civilization has certainly produced some notable results, but, in the end, it is no more than a civilization of the inherently dissatisfied, a culture for unhappy peoples.

Though, like a lightning flash, some sword May lop my head, it were as though Spring winds were slashed. One is not awed

By threats of such a blowless blow.

For which reason laymen are loud in their praises of matters they do not understand and scholars lecture unintelligibly on points as clear as day.

If one can become a fine scholar by rubbing away at a glass bead, the road to intellectual eminence must be open to us all.

The strange thing is that, to his dying day, the mulish bigot regards his dull opiniatrety as somehow meritorious, a characteristic worthy to be honored. He never realizes that he has made himself a despised laughing stock, and that sensible people want nothing more to do with him. He has, in fact, achieved happiness. I understand that such joy, the wallowing well-being of a pig in its sty, is even called pig’s happiness.

I am a cat. Some of you may wonder how a mere cat can analyze his master’s thoughts with the detailed acumen which I have just displayed. Such a feat is a mere nothing for a cat. Quite apart from the precision of my hearing and the complexity of my mind, I can also read thoughts. Don’t ask me how I learned that skill. My methods are none of your business.

It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.

Thus, though human beings are always enormously pleased with themselves, they usually lack that self-perception which, and which alone, might justify their seeing themselves, and their boasting of it wherever they go, as the lords of all creation.

One must learn to think it a pleasure to be spat upon, shat upon, and then held up to be laughed at. If one cannot learn these simple lessons, there is no chance of becoming a friend of such clever creatures as women.

“I asked if you, too, were driven crazy by a troublesome wife.” “You must be joking again. But, to answer your question, I’m not particularly troubled by my wife, perhaps because she loves me.”

“As I see it, there are only two roads by which a man may come to perfect bliss: by the road of love, and by the road of art. Of all the forms of love, married love is perhaps the noblest. It therefore seems to me that to remain unmarried is to flout the will of Heaven.