If Cats Disappeared from the World

by Genki Kawamura

What else could you call it apart from love? And love, this magical thing that’s unique to human beings and can sometimes make us absolutely miserable, is also the thing that buoys the human spirit. Like time, color, temperature, and loneliness, love is one of those things that only humans experience. These things can rule over or control us, but they also allow us to live more fully. They are precisely what make us human. No sooner had these thoughts occurred to me than my ears suddenly picked up something that sounded like the ticking of a clock. But when I looked around, everything was just as before; there were no clocks to be found anywhere. Nevertheless, even though I couldn’t see it with my eyes, I got the feeling that there was something spurring me on. I started to get the sense that the endless ticking sound in my head might actually be the sound of the hearts of all the people in the world beating in time with one another.