The Cat and The City

by Nick Bradley

Don’t you ever just feel like things change? Like, even if something dramatic or terrible in your life doesn’t happen, just the act of growing older is like a massive trauma anyway. When I think of sitting on the tatami with my older brother when we were kids, there’s just something overwhelmingly painful about the thought of having lost that moment. This wave of nostalgia which constantly reminds us that we can never go home again. That those kids sitting on the floor, so young and so happy, are dead and gone now. They’re never coming back. And don’t get me started on my younger brother, who is so much younger . . . he’s stopped going to elementary school, and he won’t talk to anyone. And there’s nothing I can do to help him. He used to be such a happy kid, but it’s like the very act of growing old is slowly killing him . . .’

Sometimes I feel like this whole city is one vast organism. It’s like a human being that we’re all part of. But we’re restricted by the roads, by the waterways, by the tunnels, the trains. It’s like our paths are all laid out for us, and there’s no way of deviating from them. That’s what makes that cat different from us. It can jump on and off trains randomly. But we humans are bound up in the fate of the city. No one can escape its clutches. I’d love to pack up and leave for the countryside, but I can’t get away. I’m stuck here. Kindergarten, Elementary School, Junior High, High School, University, Internship, Internship to Job, Job to Retirement, Retirement to Death. That’s my life, already laid out before me. Me, and all those other millions of people I brush up against every day. The city needs us, and we need the city. Symbiotic fuck tonnage.

None of this has happened yet. I’m still sitting on the train imagining the future. But why is it that it seems like it’s already happened? Like it’s happened thousands of times before, that it always will happen, like a piece of CCTV footage of the city, stuck on a loop. She’s still resting her head on my shoulder, and all I can think about is whether we have any control over our lives. How can I change the future? Because what is fate, but that moment when you’re playing the computer on the hardest difficulty setting, you’ve run out of life force and you make that one mistake. It’s those excruciating moments that pass by like an eternity before that final hit comes. You know you’ve fucked up, and there’s no way of going back. You can press pause as much as you like, but it won’t stop what’s going to happen.

Deru kui wa utareru – the nail that sticks out will be hammered in.

tsundoku – a word that required a sentence in English: buying books and piling them up on a shelf without reading them.

All these people, all these lives going on – and they’re all too wrapped up in themselves. They don’t notice others in need . . . Who knows, maybe they’re all suffering. I shouldn’t judge.’

You’re a bad person, Ishikawa. I’m not. Yes, you are. No matter how you spin it. You’re a bad man. No. I’m one of the good guys. You just keep telling yourself that, buddy. I’m one of the good guys. You’re one of the bad guys. But I’m trying so hard to be one of the good guys.