I Am a Cat

by Natsume Soseki; Aiko Ito; Graeme Wilson

  “Happy are they who don’t worry about repayment; as happy as those who do not worry about death,” intoned Singleman in his most lofty and unworldly style.

  “I suppose you’d argue that the bravest in the face of death are those who are most enlightened?”

  “Most certainly. Perhaps you know the Zen phrase ‘The iron-ox-heart of an iron-ox-face: the ox-iron-heart of an ox-iron-face?’”

  “And are you claiming to be so ox-and-iron-hearted?” Waverhouse, who happened to know that the phrase meant to have a heart so strong as to be undisturbed by anything, doubted that Singleman would dare make such a claim.

  “Well, no, I wouldn’t go that far. But,” said Singleman for no very obvious reason, “the fact remains that neurasthenia was an unknown ailment until after people became worried about death.”

  “It’s plain that you must have been born and bred before the invention of nervous prostration.”

  This weird dialogue held so little interest for Coldmoon and Beauchamp that my master had no difficulty in retaining them as an audience for a further airing of his grievances against civilization. “The key question,” he announced, “is how to avoid repaying borrowed money.”

  “But surely no such question can arise. Anything borrowed must always be repaid.”

  “All right, all right. Don’t get so up in the air. This is just a discussion between intelligent men, so listen and don’t interrupt. I ask how can one borrow without repaying in order to lead in to the parallel question as to how can one contrive to avoid dying. Though it is no longer much pursued, that used to be the key question: hence the ancient concern with alchemy. However, the alchemists achieved no real success and it soon became deadly clear that no human being could ever dodge death.”

  “It was deadly clear long before the alchemists confirmed it.”

  “All right, but since this is just an argument, you just listen. Right?

  Now, once it became clear that everyone was bound to die, then the second question arose.”

  “Indeed?”

  “If one is certain to die, what’s the best way to do so? That is the second question. Once this second question had been formulated, it was only a matter of time before the Suicide Club would be founded.”

  “I see.”

  “It is hard to die, but it is much harder if one cannot die. Victims of neurasthenia find living far more painful than any death. Yet they remain obsessed with death; not because they shun it, but because they fret to discover the best means to that much desired end. The majority will lack the common sense to solve the problem. They will give up and leave nature to solve it for them or society itself will bully them to death. But there will also be a handful of awkward customers who will be unwilling to endure the slow death of such bullying. They will study the options into death and their research will lead to marvelous new ideas.

  Beyond all doubt, the main characteristic of the future will be a steady rise in suicides and, almost certainly, every self-destructor will be expected to work out his own original method of escape.”

  “People will be put to a great deal of trouble.”

  “Yes, they most certainly will. Henry Arthur Jones has already written a play in which the leading figure is a philosopher who strongly advocates suicide.”

  “Does he kill himself?”

  “Regrettably, no. But within a thousand years everyone will be doing it, and I am prepared to bet that in ten thousand years time nobody will even think of death except in terms of suicide.”

  “But that will be terrible.”

  “Indeed it will. By that time the study of suicide, on a foundation of years of detailed research, will have been raised to the level of a highly respected and fully institutionalized science. At middle schools such as the Hall of the Descending Clouds the study of suicide will have replaced ethics as a compulsory subject.”

  “An intriguing prospect. A lecture course on the theory and practice of suicide might well be worth attending. Hey, Waverhouse, have you been listening to Sneaze on the destiny of man?”

  “Yes I have. By the time of which he has just been speaking the ethics teacher at the Hall of the Descending Clouds will be holding our current concepts of public morality up to reproof and ridicule. The young men of that far world will be instructed to abandon the barbarous customs of the ancients and to recognize that suicide is the first duty of every decent person. Moreover, since it is eternally right to do unto others as one would wish done to oneself the moral obligation to commit suicide implies an equally moral obligation to commit murder. Consider, the teacher will say, the case of Mr. Peke Sneaze, that wretched, struggling scholar dragging out his miserable existence just across from our school. Is he not obviously agonized by his persistent breathing yet lacks the ordinary physical courage to fulfill his moral duty to do away with himself? Is it not therefore, in common humanity, your compassionate duty to do him in? Not, of course, in any of the ancient cowardly ways involving such crudities as spears, halberds or any kind of firearm. In this day and age we are surely civilized beyond such coarse atrocities. No, he should be harassed unto death. Only the most refined techniques of verbal assassination should be employed. Which will be not only an act of charity toward that luckless sufferer but a credit to yourselves and to the school.”

  “This extension lecture,Waverhouse upon Sneaze, is deeply interesting. I am truly moved by the high-mindedness of our descendants.”

  “Yes, but there’s even more upon which to laud our unborn heirs. In our ill-governed times the police are intended to safeguard the lives and property of citizens. But in the happier times of our enlightened future, the police will carry cudgels, like dog-catchers, and go around clubbing the citizens to death.”

  “Why that?”

  “Because today we value our lives and the police accordingly protect them. When in the future, living is recognized for the agony it is, then the police will be required to club the agonized to a merciful death. Of course, anyone in his right mind will already have committed suicide; so the necessary objects of police attention will be only the gutless milk-sops, those mentally impaired or deranged and any persons so pitifully disabled as to be unable to destroy themselves. Additionally, anyone in need of help or assistance will, as today, just stick up a notice to that effect on the gate to his house. The police will call around at some convenient time and promptly supply to the man or woman concerned the assistance requested. The dead bodies? Collected in hand drawn carts by the police on their regular rounds. The police themselves? Recruited from criminals guilty of acts so hideous they’ve been condemned to life.

  And that’s not all. Consider this further interesting aspect of. . .”

  “But is there no end to this joke?” exclaims Beauchamp from the daze of his admiration. Before an answer could be given, Singleman began to speak, very slowly and with great deliberation, even though he still continued worrying away at his ridiculous tuft of beard.

  “You may call it a joke, but it might well, and better, be called a prediction. Those whose minds are not unwaveringly concentrated upon the pursuit of ultimate truth are normally misled by the mere appearances, however unreal, of the phenomenal world. They tend to accept what they directly see and feel, not as some empty froth of illusion but as manifestations of an eternal reality. Consequently, if someone says anything even slightly out of the ordinary, such prisoners of their senses have no choice but to treat the communication as a joke.”

  “Do you mean,” says Coldmoon, deeply impressed, “something like that Chinese verse about small birds being unable to understand the minds of greater birds?

  The swallow and the sparrow see no use

  In things that, to the eagle and the goose,

  Are plainly useful. It could even be

  That from their littleness the little see

  Nothing whatever of Immensity.”

  And he smirks with delight when Singleman, with an approving inclination of his head, says, “Something like
that.”

  Singleman, the even plodding of his speech unspurred even by adulation, slowly continues. “Once, years ago, there was a place in Spain called Cordoba. . .”

  “Once? It’s still there, isn’t it?”

  “That may be. The question of time past or present is immaterial. In any event, in Cordoba it used to be the custom that at the time of the angelus, the evening striking of the bells of churches, all the women came out of their houses and bathed in the river. . .”

  “Even in winter?”

  “I’m not sure about that, but in any case, every female in the place—young or old—jumped into the river, and no man was allowed to join them. The men simply looked on from a distance, and all they could see in the evening twilight were the women’s whitish forms dimly moving above the rippling waters.”

  “That’s poetic. It could be made into a new-style poem. What did you say the place was called?” Beauchamp always shows interest whenever female nudity is mentioned.

  “Cordoba. Now, the young men thought it a pity that they could neither swim with the women nor study their form in a better light. So, one fine day, they played a little trick. . .”

  “Oh really? Tell me more,” says Waverhouse immediately. The mention of any kind of trick has, upon him, the same invigorating effect as nudity works upon Beauchamp.

  “They bribed the bell-ringer to sound the angelus one hour early. The women, being such sillies, all trooped down to the riverbank as soon as they heard the bells, and there, one after another in their various states of undress, they jumped off into the water. And then, too late, they at last realized that it was still broad day.”

  “Are you sure that there wasn’t a fierce autumn sun ablaze?”

  “A great number of men were standing watching from the bridge.

  The women didn’t know what to do and felt terribly ashamed.”

  “And then?”

  “The moral is simply this: that one should always be wary of the common human failing of allowing oneself to be blinded by habit to basic realities.”

  “Not a bad little sermon. A tale worth remembering. But let me give you another example, from a magazine story which I recently read, of someone rendered blind by an accustomed habit. Imagine that I’ve opened an antique shop and that, up at the front, I’ve put on display some particularly excellent scrolls and works of art. No fakes, nothing shabby, only genuine, first-class stuff. Naturally the prices are very high.

  In due course along comes some art fancier who stops and enquires about the price of a certain scroll. I point out that the scroll is by Motonobu, that son of Masanobu who founded the Kano school in the early sixteenth century, and I then quote some quite astronomical sum, say, six thousand. The customer replies that he likes the scroll very much but, at such a price, and not carrying such large sums of money on his person, he’ll have to let it go.”

  “How can you possibly know,” asks my master, ever the wet blanket, “that the customer will answer like that?”

  “Don’t worry, he will. And anyway it’s only a story, so I can make my customer answer as I like. So I then say to him, ‘Please, for those of us who appreciate Motonobu, payment is hardly the point. If you like it, take it with you.’The customer can hardly do that. So he hesitates. I proceed in my friendliest manner to say that, confident that I shall be enjoying his future patronage, I would be happy to settle any difficulties about payment by accepting small sums paid monthly over a long period. ‘Please don’t feel under any obligation. But how about a hundred a month? Or shall we say fifty?’ Finally, after a few more questions and answers, I end up selling him the Motonobu scroll for six thousand paid in monthly installments of only a hundred.”

  “Sounds like that scheme in 1898 for buying the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica Through the Times.”

  “The Times is reliable, an honest sort of broker, but my scheme is of a very different character. As, if you listen carefully, you’ll see. Now, Coldmoon, suppose you pay a hundred a month for my Motonobu, how long will you be paying installments?”

  “For five years? Of course, isn’t it?”

  “Five years, of course. Now, Singleman, do you think five years is a long time or a short time?”

  Singleman raised his head into its best position for the drone of Zen wisdom and intoned:

  “A single minute may be felt to be

  As sempeternal as eternity,

  While ten millenia can at times go by

  In the mere flicker of an adder’s eye.

  “By which I mean your five years could be either long or short or simultaneously both.”

  “You’re at it again, Singleman. Is there some deep moral message in that quotation? A sense of morals totally detached from common sense, eh? Anyway, a hundred a month for five years involves sixty separate payments, and therein lies the danger of habit. If one repeats the same action sixty times over, month after month, one is likely to become so habituated to payment that one also coughs up on the sixty-first occasion. And on the sixty-second. And on the sixty-third and so on because the breaking of an established habit irks the habitue. Men are supposed to be clever, but they all have the same weakness: they follow established patterns without questioning the reason for their establishment. My scheme simply exploits that weakness to earn me a hundred a month until my customer finally drops dead.”

  “Though I like your joke,” tittered Coldmoon, “I doubt if you’ll find a great many customers so profitably forgetful.”

  My master, however, did not seem to find the story funny. In a serious voice he said, “That sort of thing does actually happen. I used to pay back my university loan, month after month on a regular basis, and I kept no count of the number of payments. In the end I only stopped because the university told me to stop.” My master seems almost to brag of his half-wittedness as though it were the benchmark of humanity.

  “There you are,” cries Waverhouse. “You see, the reality of my imagined customer is sitting right here in front of us. Yet that very same person, a self-confessed slave to human habit, has the effrontery to laugh at my projection of his own vision of our future civilization into its likely and unlaughable reality. Inexperienced young fellows like Beauchamp and Coldmoon, if they are not to be defrauded of their human rights, should listen very carefully for the wisdom in our words.”

  “I hear and shall obey. Never, never shall I commit myself to any installment plan that involves more than sixty repayments.”

  “I know you still think it’s all just a joke but I do assure you, Coldmoon, that it was a truly instructive story,” said Singleman turning directly to face him. “For instance, suppose that someone as wise and experienced as either Sneaze or Waverhouse told you that you had acted improperly in going off and getting married without advising any of the interested parties of your intentions? Should they advise that you ought to go and apologize to that Goldfield person, what would you do? Would you go and make your apologies?”

  “I should beg to be excused. I would not demur if they wished to go and offer an explanation of my behavior. But to go myself, no.”

  “What if the police ordered you to apologize?”

  “I should refuse all the more strongly.”

  “If a minister of the government or a peer of the realm asked you to apologize?”

  “Then, yet more firmly still, I would refuse.”

  “There, you see how times have changed. Not so long ago the power of those in authority was unlimited. Then came a time when there were certain things which even they could not demand. But nowadays there are strict limits upon the power of peers and even ministers to compel the individual. To put the matter bluntly, we are witnessing a period when, the greater the power of the authorities, the greater the resistance they’ll encounter. Our fathers would be astonished to see how things which the authorities clearly want done, and have ordered should be done, nevertheless remain undone. This era takes for granted any number of things which elderly people would
once have thought unthinkable. It is quiet extraordinary how quickly and how totally both men and their concept of society can change. So, though you may of course laugh as much as you like at Waverhouse’s version of the future, you would be wise not to laugh so hard that you fail to consider how much of it might prove true.”

  “Flattered as I am to have found so appreciative a friend, I feel that much more obliged to continue with my forecast of the future. First I would emphasize, as Singleman has already indicated, that anyone nowadays who proudly thinks himself powerful by reason of delegated authority, or who seeks to maintain an outdated power by marching around with a troop of a hundred henchmen brandishing bamboo spears, can only be compared to that antiquated bigot who imagined that his spanking palanquin could travel faster than a railway train. I fancy that the best local example of such a fathead might actually be that usurer Goldfield, whom I consider the master fathead of them all. So perhaps we should simply relax and leave time to slide over him.

  Anyway, my forecast of the future is not so much concerned with such minor transitional matters as with a particular social phenomenon that will determine the long-term destiny of the entire human race. My friends, if you will take a long-term view of the trends already obvious in the development of our civilization, you will have no choice but to share my view that marriage has had it. Are you surprised? That the sacred institution of marriage should be so summarily written off? Well, the grounds for my forecast have already been stated and, I think, accepted: that modern society is centered, to the exclusion of all else, upon the idea of individuality. When the family was represented by its head, the district by its magistrate and the province by its feudal lord, then those who were not representatives possessed no personalities whatsoever. Even if exceptionally, they actually did have personalities, those characteristics, being inappropriate to their place in society, were never recognized as such. Suddenly everything changed. We were all discovered to possess personalities, and every individual began to assert his newfound individuality. Whenever two persons chanced to meet, their attitudes betrayed a disposition to quarrel, an underlying determination to insist that ‘I am I, and you are you,’ and that no human being was any more human than any other. Obviously, each individual grew a little stronger by reason of this new individuality. But, of course, precisely because everyone had grown stronger, everyone had also grown proportionately weaker than their fellow-individuals. Because it’s now harder for people to oppress you, certainly you’re stronger; but because it’s now a lot more difficult for you to meddle in other folk’s affairs, you’re clearly that much weaker. Everyone, naturally, likes to be strong, and no one, naturally, likes to be weak. Consequently, we all vigorously defend the strong points in our position in society, scrapping like fiends over the merest trifles, and at the same time, in an unremitting effort to undermine the position of our fellows, we lever away at their weakest points at every opportunity. It follows that men have no genuine living space left between them which is not occupied by siege engines and counterworks. Too cramped to live at ease, the constant pressure to expand one’s individual sphere has brought mankind to a painful bursting point and, having arrived by their own machinations at such an unpleasant state of affairs, men thereupon devised a means to relieve the unbearable pressure: they developed that system under which parents and their married offspring live separately. In the more backward parts of Japan, among the wilder mountains, you can still find entire families, including their lesser cousinage, all living together, perfectly contentedly, in one single house. That lifestyle was only viable because, apart from the head of the family, no member of the group possessed any individuality to assert; while any member who, exceptionally, happened to possess it, took good care never to let it show. However, in more up-to-date and civilized communities the individual members of families are struggling amongst themselves, no less fiercely than do other and totally unrelated members of modern society, both to guard their own positions and to undermine those of their so-called nearest and dearest.