Oct
3
What is the only meaningful 600-pp novel in the history of modern mankind that is narrated by a single cat I would guess that it might be the aptly titled I Am A Cat by Soseki Natsume. If there are other great novels narrated by cats or dogs, please let me know because I love nothing more than reading about the world through the pristine and prismic consciousness of a domesticated animal. Especially if it’s through the eyes of a cat who is perceptive to classical Chinese philosophy, and to the erosion of the traditional society in the Meiji Japan. Soseki’s novel, according to the author himself, was structurally inspired by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and like Sterne’s book, I Am A Cat is rambling, funny, and light-on-its-feet, even as it deals with nothing less than the ramifications of a modernizing society, the eradication of the cultural memory.
Before I give you Today’s Sentence, I’d like to digress a bit about something that just occurred to me. I just remembered that Dave Eggers wrote a luminous story a few years ago, called “After I Was Thrown Into A River and Before I Drowned,” narrated by a dog named Steven. As you might have guessed, at the end of the story, Steven drowns in the river. In the coda to the story, Steven has a transcendental moment of realization in the brief inception of his afterlife. I wonder if Eggers was influenced by I Am A Cat, as the anonymous Cat in Soseki’s novel also dies by drowning in the end: “I am dying, Egypt, dying,” the Cat says. “Through death I’m drifting slowly into peace. Only by dying can this divine quiescence be attained. May one rest in peace! I am thankful. Thankful, thankful, thankful.” I love it. But am I the only one that sees the eerie similarity in the Eggers’ story, the specific tone of its ending
![cat.jpg](.php"/base/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/cat.jpg")
Sorry for the long digression. But to set up Today’s Sentence: the Cat is thinking about the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) that is raging. As he ponders on how to strategically cut off the rats as they emerge from the kitchen cupboard, he thinks about how Admiral Togo of Japan similarly excruciated over how to cut off the Russian Baltic Fleet, whether to anticipate the fleet’s passing through the Straits of Tsushima, or the Straits of Tsugaru, or through the Straits of La Pérouse between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. As he waits for the rats, he notices the moonlight slanting in “from the transom like a woman’s broad white sash stretched out along the air.” Remaining motionless, the Cat thinks about his enemy and the nature of his stupid warfare, which should resonate with at least some of us today -
When, unexpectedly, one’s enemy turns out to be so pettily paltry, the sense of war as an honorable activity cannot be sustained and one is left with nothing but a feeling of naked hatred.
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