I Am a Cat

Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd. Originally published in three volumes by Tuttle Publishing in 1972 (Vol. I), 1979 (Vol. II), and 1986 (Vol. III). Volume I was originally published in Japan by the Asahi Shimbun Publishing Company in the Japan Quarterly, Vol. XVII, No. 4, and Vol. XVIII, Nos. 1 and 2. Chapter I of Volume II was originally published in Japan by the Asahi Shimbun Publishing Company in the Japan Quarterly, Vol. XII, No. 4.

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Copyright © 1972, 1979, 1986, 2002 (compilation) by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002100535

ISBN 978-1-4629-0175-3

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contents

 
INTRODUCTION

S
ŌSEKI NATSUME is the pen name of Kin’nosuke Natsume (1867- 1916), the eighth and youngest son of a family of minor town-gentry. The family’s hereditary occupation as ward-chiefs in Tokyo under the Tokugawa shogunate disappeared with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and thus they fell upon hard times, yet Sōseki received the compulsory modern education, both primary and at middle school level, which had been introduced in 1872.

In his mid-teens he switched to a private school for Chinese studies and, though upper-class tradition regarded literature as no more than a civilized diversion, he began to toy with the idea of adopting it as a working profession. However, extensively educated in both the Chinese and the Japanese literary traditions, Sōseki recognized early on the importance of English to any senior career under the westernizing influence of the restored regime and, specifically, to the entry requirements of Tokyo Imperial University-then the only university in the capital. Hoping to become an architect, he entered that university’s Department of Engineering in 1881, but he soon transferred to the Department of Literature that same year. In September 1890, Sōseki joined the Department of English Literature as a loan-scholarship student of the Ministry of Education.

The English department, founded in 1888, had produced only one previous graduate, a student of the first year who became a customs inspector in Shanghai. Sōseki graduated in July 1893 and then briefly enrolled as a postgraduate student. He applied unsuccessfully for a post as a journalist with the English-language
Japan Mail
in Yokohama and taught for a time at Tokyo Normal College. ln 1895 he suddenly left Tokyo to become a provincial teacher- first in Shikoku (where his university friend, the
haiku
poet Masaoka Shiki, resided) and later, in 1896, at Kumamoto in Kyushu. There, by formal arrangement, he married Nakane Kyoko, the eldest daughter of the chief secretary of the House of Peers. In 1900 the Ministry of Education sent him on a miserable scholarship to London University. For two unhappy years in London, he seems to have done nothing but read an almost incredible number of books on every conceivable subject and, at the same time, make himself an authority on eighteenth-century literature. His only social contacts with the British appear to have been a weekly private English lesson with W J. Craig-subsequently the editor of the
Arden Shakespeare
--and a single tea party given in Dulwich by the wife of a missionary whom he had met on the ship bringing him to England. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that Sōseki formed a poor opinion of English social life and that back in japan he was widely rumored to have gone mad.
 

In 1903 he returned to Tokyo and, shortly thereafter, in fulfillment of the terms of his London scholarship, served four years as a lecturer in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. During this period he began writing. He had formed various useful literary friendships while he was a student at the university, and, though his close friend Shiki had died in 1902, the editorial board of the influential literary magazine
Hototogisu (Cuckoo)
, which Shiki had founded, still included many men who were Sōseki’s personal friends.

Takahama Kyoshi--one of the editors of
Hototogisu
, but not a close friend of Sōseki-allegedly asked Soseki to write something for the magazine. Accordingly, during 1904, Sōseki produced his first short story, which he called
I Am a Cat
. Takahama read it, told Sōseki that it was no good, and, when Sōseki asked for an explanation, provided comment in considerable detail. Today it seems ludicrous that one of the three or four best novelists ever to write in japanese should have been glad to receive guidance from such a relatively insignificant figure asTakahama. However, we must remember that, at that time, Takahama was a wellknown, well-established, and very influential editor (a man with the sensitivity to divine Sōseki’s promise and the kindness to give him guidance), while Sōseki was a virtually unknown young man who had just produced his first, and really rather odd, short story. In any event, Sōseki appears to have accepted the advice (though he later stated that he could not remember what that advice had been) and rewrote the story. Takahama liked the second version and published it in the January 1905 issue of
Hototogisu
.

Sōseki had not intended to write more than that single short story, which is now the first chapter of a very long book, but Takahama was so pleased with its immediate success that he persuaded Sōseki to write further installments. The subsequent ten chapters that make up I Am a Cat were thus successively published in
Hototogisu’s
issues for February, April, June, July, and October 1905 and for January, March, April, and August 1906. The seventh and eighth chapters appeared together in the issue for January 1906. This somewhat curious account of the origin and development of Sōseki’s famous novel rests primarily upon Takahama’s testimony in his later book
Soseki and I
, but there is no reason to doubt that it is substantially correct. The actual book of
I Am a Cat
was first published in three-volume form, the volumes appearing in October 1905, November 1906, and May 1907. The first single-volume edition was published in 1911.

Takahama’s account of how this story came to be a novel explains the unevenness, even jerkiness, of the early parts of the book. Indeed, though the first chapter is adequately articulated into the total work, it is as clear from that chapter’s ending as from Sōseki’s own later remarks- “When the first chapter appeared in
Hototogisu
, it was my intention to stop there” -that he originally meant to write no more. There are, moreover, one or two minor points in that first chapter that an ungenerous critic might highlight as inconsistent with subsequent portions of the book. The second chapter, nearly the longest of them all, shows Sōseki still feeling his way towards the right chapter length. He did not really hit his stride until the third chapter, which finally established the tone, length, and character of the remaining eight.

The circumstances of the book’s construction no doubt largely account for its rambling structure and discursive content; however, Sōseki must very quickly have realized that the technique used by Laurence Sterne for the construction of
The Life and Opinions if Tristram Shandy
would very neatly solve his own problems. Though Sōseki’s total book is held together by the continuing theme of a nameless eat’s observations on upper-middle-class Japanese society of the Meiji period, the essence of the book resides in the humor and the sardonic truth of those various observations, not in the development of the story. The eat’s eventual drunken death in a water-butt comes without any particular reason or structural build-up, and one is forced to the conclusion that Sōseki simply drowned his hero because he had run out of sufficiently humorous observations to offer on Meiji society. Consequently, it is possible to take almost any single chapter of the book as an isolated short story.

It is also worth stressing the apparent oddity of choosing for the main character in one’s first published writing a stray kitten, and a stray kit ten world-weary from the moment of its birth. However, much of the charm of
I Am a Cat
resides in its diverting presentation of a eat’s view of mankind. The satire is of man in general but the associated case for the superiority of cats, however entertainingly and persuasively put, is not inexhaustible; so that the unique cat-ness of the opening chapters simply could not be maintained in its original and beguiling purity throughout the further chapters demanded by a happily insulted public. Sōseki himself was clearly alive to these considerations, for as early as the opening paragraph of the third chapter the cat apologizes to readers for his growing resemblance to a human being and for his consequent new tendency to criticize humanity as though he, too, were human. Thus the satire beginning in Chapter 3 is less specifically feline. In yet later chapters the eat’s viewpoint becomes almost totally human, while the object of satire narrows from mankind in general (albeit as exemplified in Meiji, middle-class society) to a concentrated satirization of the particularities of that particular society. By· a combination of sheer literary skill and a seemingly endless inventiveness, Sōseki contrived to maintain the vitality of his book throughout eleven chapters and some quarter million words: but one understands why, eventually, he had no choice but to drown his hero. It would, however, be unreasonable to denigrate the first-rate satire of the later parts of
I Am a Cat
simply because they lack the full felinity, the quite exceptional beguilement, of the earlier parts of the book. Moreover, one has only to read Sōseki’s other comic novel
Botchan (The Young Master)
, of 1906, with its entirely human style of human satire, to realize that, however much humanity seeps in to soften the later portions of
I Am a Cat
, even their most uncatlike passages contain that glint, that claw-flash under velvet, which stamp them ultimately aluroid. In addition, choosing a kitten for the main character has a two-fold meaning as Soseki was, in fact, himself a stray kitten. As soon as he was born, Sōseki’s parents had put him out to nurse. In his first year he was adopted by the Shiobara family. He only rejoined his own family when the Shiobaras were divorced some eight years later. And even then he only learned that his parents were his parents from the whisperings of servants. Sōseki lived his life as do all those who feel themselves born middle-aged.