The Cat and The City

by Nick Bradley

Flo did not have an air-conditioning unit as they were too expensive, but she did have a lot of books. Her bookcases were stuffed with them, and all shelf space available was taken. Seeing her books reassured her, made her feel calm. She’d read most of them, but there were a many waiting to be read, which gave her a sense of excitement, and conjured up one of her favourite Japanese words – tsundoku – a word that required a sentence in English: buying books and piling them up on a shelf without reading them. She

Flo preferred to identify herself with Japanologists. She respected the language and culture, in the same way that she felt every culture and language should be respected. But she recognized within herself a deep-seated need to get to the bottom of every question she had. A quest for knowledge concerning Japan. To learn, to study, to absorb.

Ogawa had written the Chinese character for cat, but had cleverly shaped the character into the form of a cat. Ogawa and Flo had a shared affinity for cats, and the calligraphy itself told a story of their friendship.

人 + 木 = 休 ‘On the left we have person, we add it to tree and we get rest. Picture a person in a field leaning against a tree, resting. Characters shift meaning when placed alongside others, so it’s important we focus on the relationships between them. No character truly exists in isolation, and there’s always a story for even the most complicated or simple of characters.

This city is one of the largest prisons in the world – thirty million inhabitants.