by Hiro Arikawa
You’re the silly one. I’d never wander so far that I’d actually lose you.
‘Don’t leave me … Stay with me.’
Ah-hah! Finally.
Finally, he had said what he really meant.
I’d known for a long time how Satoru felt.
I knew he was searching hard for a new owner for me, but that as each attempt came to nothing, he felt hugely relieved to be taking me home again.
‘It’s such a shame I can’t leave him here,’ he’d tell each of his friends, but in the van on the way home he’d be all smiles. How could I ever leave him, having experienced that kind of love?
I will never, ever, leave him.
As Satoru wept silent tears, I licked his hand over and over, my rough tongue wandering over every knuckle and crevice.
It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. I realized how much Hachi would have regretted it – being separated from a child who loved him so much.
But Satoru was no longer a child. And I’m a former stray. So this time we should be able to make things work out.
Okay, let’s get back on the road! This is our final journey.
On this last trip, let’s see all sorts of wonderful things. Let’s make a pledge to take in as many amazing sights as we can.
My seven-shaped crooked tail should be able to snag every single marvellous thing we pass.
Back in the van and driving off, the doves-about-to-appear CD came to an end. Then a woman’s low, husky voice started to sing strangely and in a foreign-sounding language I couldn’t understand.
The doves-about-to-appear song was one his mother liked, apparently, while his father preferred this one, with the husky-voiced woman singing.
The road was lined as far as the eye could see with those purple and yellow flowers.
We continued driving at a leisurely pace. Hmm … when was the last time we had to stop at a traffic light?
We were no longer by the seaside but heading inland, and sturdy-looking wilderness spread out on either side. Finally, we could see cultivated, rolling hills.
I was in awe of this land, so flat and magnificent. It was like nothing I’d ever seen.
Wooden fences lined the roads now, and in the plots behind them there were – well, I wasn’t at all sure what they were. Large animals, noses to the ground, chomping away at the grass. What the hell were those things?
I put my paws up and pressed them against the passenger window, stretching up as far as I could. I often did that to check out the scenery outside, so Satoru had made a seat for me out of a large box with a cushion placed on top. Whenever I saw something that piqued my interest, I’d always lean forward like this.
‘Ah, those are horses. This area is all pasture.’
Horses? Those things? I’d seen them on TV, but this was my first time seeing the real thing. On TV, they looked much bigger. The horses chewing grass along the road were certainly large, but they were also relatively slender.
I craned my neck around to take a last look back at the horses as we passed, and Satoru laughed.
‘If you like them that much, let’s park up for a closer look next time we see some.’
In the next pasture we came to, the horses were in an enclosure quite a long way from the road.
‘It’s a little far away,’ Satoru said ruefully as he got out of the van, walked around to my side and picked me up.
When he slammed the van door shut, the horses, so distant they appeared smaller than Satoru’s hands, stopped chewing grass and raised their long heads to look at us.
There was a tense moment. The horses’ ears pricked up as they appraised us.
‘Look, they’re watching us, Nana.’
Not just watching, but carefully checking us out. They wanted to see if we were a danger to them. If we had been close enough for them to realize we were just a human and a cat, they would have been relieved.
Given their size, I didn’t think they needed to worry. But animals have an instinct. Whatever their size, horses are grass eaters, and grass eaters have a long history of being hunted by meat eaters. This makes them timid and skittish.
On the other hand, we cats may be small, but we’re hunters. And hunters are fighters. We’re on our guard, too, with creatures we don’t know, but when it comes to a fight we’re more than willing to face up to animals much bigger than us.
That’s why when dogs meddle with cats for fun, they end up whimpering, their tails between their legs. A dog ten times our size? Bring it on!
In my view, dogs have long since given up hunting. Even hunting dogs just chase their prey for the sake of their master these days, and they don’t finish it off themselves. That’s the crucial difference between them and us cats; even if we’re just hunting a bug, we’re intent on making the kill ourselves.
This point about killing prey is a major divide between various animals. Horses are certainly dozens of times bigger than me, but they don’t scare me.
A sense of pride suddenly swelled up in me. Pride in myself as a cat who still hadn’t lost his identity as a hunter.
And for me, as a hunter, I can tell you that I’m not going to back away from what lies ahead for Satoru.
The horses stared at us for a while, then concluded perhaps that we weren’t an immediate threat and returned to chomping on the grass.
‘They’re a bit far away, but I wonder if I could get a photo of them with my mobile phone.’
Satoru took his phone out of his pocket. Most of the photos he took with it, by the bye, were of me.
But I don’t think you should take one of those horses, I thought.
When Satoru held the camera out towards them, the horses’ heads popped up again. And their ears shot up, too.
They stood there, stock-still, gazing at us until Satoru had taken the photo.
‘Yeah, they’re definitely too far away.’
He gave up and put the phone away. The horses continued to stare silently.
They gazed at us right up to the moment we were back in the van and the doors were shut, before finally swinging lazily back to their meal. Apologies, my friends. Sorry to bother you, I called out.
I suppose there are animals who live like this, even though they could easily kick me, and Satoru, from here to the far end of Hokkaido.
If it is their instinct that makes them that way, then I’m glad I’m a cat and have the instinct to put up a fight. I’m happy to be a high-spirited, adventurous cat that will never be intimidated by other animals, even if they’re bigger than me.
I’ve made my point, but just to reconfirm this: meeting those horses meant a lot to me.
On the drive, I saw even more lovely scenery for the first time.
White birches with pale trunks, mountain ash with red clusters of berries like bells.
Satoru told me what everything was called. And that the mountain-ash berries are bright red. I remember some expert on TV saying once, ‘Cats have a hard time distinguishing the colour red.’
‘Wow! Would you look at how red those berries are!’ Satoru called out, and that’s how I learned about the colour red. It no doubt appeared differently to Satoru, but I learned how what Satoru called red appeared to me.
‘The ones over there aren’t so red yet.’
Every time he saw trees through the window, Satoru would talk to me about them. So I became quite skilled at discriminating between different shades of red. I just learned to distinguish, in my own way of seeing things, the variations of red that Satoru pointed out, but also that they did all indeed share the same colour. For the rest of my life, I would remember all the shades of red Satoru mentioned that day.
We saw fields, too, of potatoes and pumpkins being harvested, and fields where the harvest was over.
The harvested potatoes were stuffed into bags so huge they looked like they could hold several people, and the bags were then piled up in a corner of the field. Large pyramids of pumpkins were stacked up on top of the black, damp soil.
And here and there on the gentle hills were gigantic black or white plastic bundles. I was wondering why someone had left these toys behind, but they turned out to hold cut grass.
‘They have a lot of snow in the winter here, so before it falls they have to harvest the grass so their cows and horses will have enough to eat.’
Snow – I’ve seen some of that white stuff falling in Tokyo. It melted pretty swiftly, though, so it was nothing to get worked up about. That’s what I was thinking at the time. But once winter arrived, I began to realize, the snow here would be a whole other story. Whenever there was a snowstorm and you couldn’t see anything in front of you, even I, strong as I am, would be tossed mercilessly into the air. But that’s a tale for another time.
Countryside snow that piles up to the eaves, versus city snow that melts away in a few days. It made me wonder, honestly, how they could both go by the same name.
As we drove on, taking the occasional break at a small supermarket, the scenery became more mountainous. Finally, the sun began to set.
We crossed a mountain pass as it did so, and another town came into view. As the silver van drove on, the sky fell darker by the moment, as if playing tag with the night.
‘It’s too late today. And we can’t buy any flowers,’ murmured Satoru, sounding put out, though still he didn’t head straight for our hotel but turned off the main road.
We continued down a minor road until we reached the end of the town, where we climbed a gentle hill. At the top was a wrought-iron gate. We drove straight through it.
The land here stretched out in all directions. It was neatly partitioned into squares, and in each square was a line of square stones. I knew what they were because I’d seen them on TV.
They were graves.
Apparently, humans like to have large stones put on top of them when they are dead. I remember thinking, as I watched a programme on TV about it, that it was a strange custom. The people on the programme were discussing how expensive graves were, and so on.
When an animal’s life is over, it rests where it falls, and it often seems to me that humans are such worriers, to think of preparing a place for people to sleep when they are dead. If you have to consider what’s going to happen after you die, life becomes doubly troublesome.
Satoru drove the van through this huge area as if he knew exactly where he was heading, and at last came to a halt somewhere in the centre of it all.
We got out, and Satoru walked slowly among the graves. After a while, he came to a halt in front of a grave with a whitish stone.
‘This is my father and mother’s grave.’
It was the final spot that Satoru had been so longing to visit.
I don’t get why humans like to have a huge stone put on top of them when they kick the bucket. But I do understand why they might want to look after a splendid stone like this.
I got the sense that the long drive was becoming too much for Satoru, but still, he had made it, in his silver van, with me by his side, his cat with the number-eight markings and the crooked tail like a seven.
Cats are not so heartless that they can’t respect those sorts of emotions.
‘I wanted to pay my respects with you here, Nana.’
I know, I said, rubbing my forehead vigorously along the edge of his parents’ gravestone.
It’s a great honour to meet you. Hachi was a wonderful cat, I’m sure, but don’t you think I’m rather nice, too?
‘I’m sorry. I was in a hurry, so I’ll bring flowers tomorrow,’ Satoru said, squatting down at the grave. There were some slightly wilted flowers in a vase.
‘Ah, I see,’ Satoru murmured. ‘It was Higan recently, the time of year when people visit graves … My aunt must have come.’
Satoru tenderly stroked the wilting petals.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come here much. I should have visited you more often.’
I stepped away from the grave, to give Satoru some time alone. If I disappeared completely from sight, I knew he would become anxious, so I lingered where he could see me.
During the five years I’d lived with Satoru, he’d left home only a couple of times to visit this grave.
‘Someday, I’ll take you with me, Nana,’ he had said. ‘You look just like Hachi, and my father and mother will be so surprised.
‘Someday,’ he had promised me, ‘we’ll go on a long trip together.’ And now it was happening.
‘Nana, come here!’ Satoru called me and put me on his lap. As he stroked me gently, running his wide hand across my whole body over and over, I wondered what he was talking about so silently with his parents.
This town was Satoru’s mother’s hometown, it seemed. His grandfather and grandmother, who were farmers, had passed away fairly young, and Satoru’s mother and his aunt hadn’t been able to keep up the farm, so they let it go. His mother had apparently regretted this for the rest of her life.
Especially after Satoru became part of their family.
A hometown where the only thing left is a grave has to be a bit sad for a child. But there were only a few relatives on Satoru’s mother’s side, and they had all moved away, so what could you do?
There are so many things in life that are beyond our control.
Satoru finally straightened his legs, enveloping me tightly in his arms.
‘We’ll be back tomorrow,’ he said, then turned to the van. We drove in silence through the now completely dark town towards our lodgings for the night.
We were staying in a cosy hotel that had a few rooms reserved for humans who had pets with them. It was a very sensible little place, I must say.
Satoru must have been exhausted from all the driving, because he went out once to get something to eat but came back within the hour and fell heavily on to the bed and into a deep sleep.
The next morning, though, he got up early.
He swiftly packed his bags, and when we emerged from the hotel the sun was still just coming up.
‘Darn, the florist’s isn’t open yet.’
Satoru made one circuit of the area in front of the station and seemed at a loss.
‘Maybe somewhere will be open on the way to the cemetery …’
He’d sort of jumped the gun starting off so early, with the flower shop still closed. On the way, he pulled up at the side of the road.
‘Guess we’ll have to make do with these.’
And the flowers he started picking were the purple and yellow flowers that had decorated the road we had been driving on the previous day.
I liked them! They were much more beautiful than any you’d buy in a shop, and Satoru’s father and mother would be thrilled to be given them.
I searched out some wild chrysanthemums with open blooms and showed him. ‘So you’re looking for flowers, too, eh?’ He laughed and plucked the very ones I’d been rustling around in for him.
He gathered an armful and we continued on to the cemetery.
It had been dark yesterday, so I hadn’t noticed, but from the top of the hill you could see the town in the distance. All the way to where the urban landscape became countryside.
The cemetery had a much more cheerful feeling in the early morning than it had the previous night, though, come to think of it, even when we’d visited in the dark yesterday, I hadn’t felt at all frightened. One associates graves and temples with ghost stories, but this place had none of that gloominess, or any sense that a resentful spirit might appear at any moment.
You ask if we cats can see ghosts. Don’t you know that there are things in this world that are better left a mystery?
Satoru, with flowers and garden tools (he must have bought these last night) in his arms, got out of the van.
After cleaning the gravestone, he took the wilting flowers from the vase, changed the water and replaced them with the new ones he’d just picked, their colours bright and festive.
The vase was overflowing now, and half the flowers were left over. ‘I’ll use these later,’ he said, and wr
apped them in some damp newspaper and put them in the back of the van.
Satoru unwrapped the buns and cakes he’d bought and left these as offerings at the grave. Ants would no doubt soon swarm over them, and crows and weasels would come and whisk them away, but it was better than leaving them to rot.
Satoru then lit some incense at the grave. Apparently, in his family, it was the custom to light a whole bundle at once. I found it a bit too smoky, and slunk upwind to escape it.
Satoru sat down by the grave and gazed at it for a long time. Claws in and tucking my two front paws beneath my chest, I snuggled up on his knees, and he beamed at me and tickled under my chin with his fingertips.
‘I’m glad I could bring you, Nana,’ he whispered in a small voice that was barely audible.
He sounded really happy.
I stepped away from Satoru and took a stroll nearby, staying close so he could still see me. Below the low hedge that bordered the site, stringy butterburs grew.
And below those a cricket or something was leaping around. I sniffed around in them until Satoru came over.
‘What’s up, Nana? You’ve burrowed pretty deeply into those butterburs.’
Well, the thing is, underneath here is …
‘Something’s in there?’
Yeah, something very nimble indeed. It was just a quick glimpse, but I saw it jump. And it left behind a strange smell.
I kept sniffing below the butterbur leaves, and Satoru laughed.
‘It might be a Korobokkuru.’
Come again?
‘Tiny people that live under the butterbur leaves.’
What? That’s news to me. Are there really weird creatures like that in the world?
‘They were in a picture book I loved as a child.’
Ah – it’s just a story.
‘My parents loved that story, too. As I recall, they were both really excited when I was able to read that book by myself.’
Satoru told me all kinds of things about those tiny people, but since it was all, from a feline point of view, less than enthralling, I yawned deeply, showing my pointed teeth, and Satoru smiled.
