If Cats Disappeared From the World

by Genki Kawamura

  So there I was, absolutely screwed and approaching the bitter end.

  I scrolled through my phone’s list of contacts as fast as I could. Names of friends and acquaintances appeared and then disappeared one after the other. Each of the names seemed to carry a hidden meaning. Countless people who I seemed to have had some kind of a relationship with, but when push came to shove, didn’t really share much with after all. My contacts list was filled with people like that.

  My life was over and I had no one who mattered enough for me to call. I had lived alongside people and created so many links, but they were ultimately all so tenuous. It’s really depressing—too depressing—to realize something like that at the end of your life.

  I wasn’t keen to talk to Aloha about how I was feeling, so I left the room and went and sat on the stairs. I held on to my phone tightly, and suddenly a number began to float up from the back of my brain. It was her number. Somehow I had forgotten it, but it was as if it had been etched on my body. Her number wasn’t even in my contacts list. Slowly I began to dial . . .

  I finished the call after a few minutes and went back into the room. Aloha was playing with the cat. Actually it was more like a tussle, with both of them rolling and tumbling around on the floor. Aloha seemed to have completely forgotten about me, so I watched in silence for a while.

  Minutes went by, then . . .

  “Oh! You’re back.”

  Finally Aloha became aware of my cold stare and, somewhat embarrassed, pulled himself up off the floor. He turned to face me, taking pains to put on a serious face.

  “Are you done?”

  Oh come, on! You’re telling me the Devil likes cats? No use acting all cool and pretending nothing happened!

  I didn’t say anything, but I took a good swipe at him in my mind. When I finally got over it I answered him calmly:

  “Yes, quite finished.”

  “OK, let’s go. Make that phone disappear!”

  Aloha looked delighted and gave me a wink (kind of a pathetic wink since he didn’t seem to be able to close just one eye at a time).

  Suddenly the phone, which had been in my hand just a minute ago, was nowhere to be seen.

  “All right. Done. See ya tomorrow.”

  When I looked up the Devil was gone.

  “Miaow.”

  The cat’s meow echoed sadly in the apartment.

  I had to go and see her—the person I had just phoned. Her.

  But then, just as this thought passed through my brain I fell into a deep sleep.

  And so my seven-day odyssey had begun.

  TUESDAY: IF PHONES DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

  My roommate is a cat.

  You know that old story by Soseki Natsume, I am a Cat? It’s something like that, but not quite. The cat’s name is Cabbage.

  You might have forgotten all about this by now, so why don’t I try and jog your memory.

  I was five when my mother found the abandoned kitten and brought it home with her. It poured with rain that day, and the kitten had been left in a cardboard box by the side of the road. Mom found it on her way home from the supermarket. The poor thing was soaked. Printed on the side of the box were the words “Nagano Lettuce,” and so after my mother had got the kitten home and dried it off with a towel she announced, “This little boy’s name is Lettuce.”

  This was pretty unusual—my mother had never liked animals. It took her a while to get used to stroking Lettuce, and at first, she was a bit clumsy. So in the early days, I helped her to take care of the cat, until she got used to him.

  To make matters worse, Mom found out that she was allergic to cats. The sneezing just wouldn’t stop. For a whole month the tears and sniffling went on and on, but she never considered giving the cat away.

  “I can’t let him go—he chose me.”

  Then she’d wipe her flushed, puffy face and carry on caring for the cat.

  And then one day, about a month later, Mom’s cat allergy suddenly disappeared. It was a miracle, or maybe her body got used to it. In any case, one day it was suddenly gone, and Mom was free of all the symptoms—the sneezes, the tears, and the runny nose.

  I remember that day really clearly—Lettuce wouldn’t leave her side for a minute, constantly snuggling up to her.

  “In order to gain something you have to lose something.”

  Mom said it was just obvious. People are always trying to get something for nothing. But that’s just theft. If you’ve gained something it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune. Mom often told me this, she considered it one of the laws of the universe.

  Lettuce lived for eleven years. He developed a tumor and lost a ton of weight. Toward the end he just slept a lot, and died peacefully in his sleep.

  The day after Lettuce died, Mom wouldn’t move. She had always been bright and cheerful, and actually liked cooking and cleaning. But now suddenly she was no longer in the mood to do anything. She just stayed at home and cried. So I did the laundry, and then I’d drag Mom out for dinner at the local chain restaurant. Over time, I think we tried out every item on the menu.

  A month went by like that and then one day, suddenly and unexpectedly, Mom arrived home with another rescued kitten in her arms, as if it happened every day.

  The kitten looked just like Lettuce. It was a round, black and white mass with a mixture of grey. A beautiful cat. It looked so much like Lettuce we decided to call him Cabbage.

  Looking at him all curled up Mom laughed and said, “He really does look just like Lettuce.” It was the first time she had smiled in a month. Seeing her laugh again after such a long time made me teary.

  Or maybe just well up a bit. I guess I was worried that Mom might just fade away, disappear off to some faraway place and never come back.

  Then four years ago she really did leave us.

  “What a coincidence—I have the thing that Lettuce had,” said Mom, laughing faintly.

  Just like Lettuce, the weight dropped off Mom, and in the end, she went to sleep and simply never woke up. She died peacefully.

  “Take care of Cabbage,” she implored me before she died.

  Fate, it seems, has a sense of humor—I’ll end up dying before Cabbage just like Mom. She’d be pretty unimpressed with me, I’m sure. I can just imagine her saying she should have left Cabbage with someone else.

  Next thing I knew it was morning.

  For the first time in a while I’d dreamed about my mother.

  Cabbage meowed nearby. I pulled him close to me and gave the soft furry ball a squeeze. His silky, fluffy, and warm body was life-giving.

  And then I remembered. I had gained one extra day of life.

  I was wondering how many of the previous day’s events I’d imagined. Maybe it all really happened, but on the other hand, it could have been a dream. But my phone, which I normally would have left on the bedside table, was nowhere to be found. And the fever, which I’d had for so long, had gone, along with my headache. Maybe that meant that the deal I made with the Devil was also real?

  Telephones had disappeared from the world.

  When you think about it that’s not such a bad thing, especially when it comes to mobile phones!

  Lately it seemed like I was messing around on my stupid phone all the time, from morning till night, just before bed. I didn’t read many books anymore, and I didn’t read newspapers. DVDs I borrowed just piled up in my room unwatched.

  On the train on the way to work I was always looking at my phone. Even when I was watching a movie, I checked my phone regularly. And when I was eating. When my lunch break came around I got this terrible urge to look at my phone. Even when I was with Cabbage I’d end up looking at the phone instead of playing with him. Being such a slave to it made me hate myself.

  Mobile phones have been around for only about twenty years, but in just that short time they’ve managed to take complete control over us. In just twenty short years something that we don�
�t really need has come to rule our lives, making us believe that we can’t do without it. When human beings invented the mobile phone, they also invented the anxiety of not having one.

  But who knows, maybe we went through the same thing when people first started sending letters. It’s the same with the internet. Throughout human history we’ve given birth to new things, only to lose the old. When you put it like that, maybe God was on to something when he accepted the Devil’s proposal.

  I know you’re probably wondering who I made my last call to.

  It’s kind of personal, but all right, I’ll tell you.

  She’s the first woman I ever loved. My first girlfriend.

  OK, now don’t go calling me a sentimental moron.

  They say that when a man is dying, the first name that comes to mind is his first love. In this, I think I share something with the common man.

  Lounging in the morning sun, I took my time getting out of bed. I listened to the radio while I cooked breakfast. Made some coffee, fried an egg, and plopped one slice of bread in the toaster. Then I sliced a tomato and placed it on the plate. After breakfast I had another cup of coffee and leisurely read a book. Ah, life without a phone. It was so good! It seemed as if time had suddenly lengthened, while the space opened up and spread out.

  Midday approached.

  I slammed the book shut and headed for the bathroom. I took a nice hot shower, and then put on my clothes (the usual black & white) which lay neatly folded nearby. Then I headed out to see her.

  The first place I went after leaving the apartment was the barbershop (my usual place). I realized it was absurd taking the time to get a haircut when I was about to die, but I wanted to look good for my ex-girlfriend, so don’t laugh.

  After fixing my hair I stopped by the optician’s across the street to get new glasses, then went to catch the tram. One was just arriving as I got there so I ran and jumped onto one of its green carriages.

  It was a weekday so it was packed. Normally, all of the passengers would be looking at their phones. But today was different. Instead, people were reading books, listening to music, or staring outside at the scenery. People seemed to have no trouble finding something to fill their free time. Their facial expressions seemed cheerful, somehow.

  Why do people look so serious when they’re checking their phones? It seemed so calm inside the tram without those contraptions. Not only had I won an extra day of life for myself, it looked like I’d also done the world a big favor.

  But had phones really disappeared from this world completely?

  I looked out the window of the tram at a sign for a noodle shop, which sat on the corner of the shopping district. (This is where Cabbage secretly goes at night for dried bonito shavings.) The shop’s phone number appeared on the sign as always. And when I looked around the inside of the tram I could see that there were still posters advertising mobile phones. But no one on the tram was on their phone . . . What did this all mean?

  Then I suddenly remembered. Something similar happened in an old comic book series I used to read as a kid. Doraemon, Tentomushi Comics, Vol. 4. That’s the time one of Doraemon’s secret gadgets, the pebble hat, is introduced.

  The story goes like this:

  As usual, Nobita Nobi (the kid who’s the main character in the series) has been told off by his parents. Nobita goes to Doraemon for comfort, complaining, “They don’t need to watch me so carefully all the time. I just want to be left alone.” Then Doraemon pulls a gadget out of that fourth-dimensional pocket of his: the Pebble Hat.

  Doraemon explains: “When you wear this hat, you’ll be like a pebble on the ground—unnoticed.” In other words, you’ll still exist, but no one will notice.

  Nobita is thrilled and puts on the hat. For a while, he enjoys being left alone. But then, he starts to get lonely. And when he tries to take off the hat he can’t. It’s stuck on his head, so he starts to cry. It’s his tears that make the hat come off, and Mama and Papa start to notice him again. Then Nobita says, “I’m glad people care about me,” and that’s the end of the story.

  Well, I went off on quite a tangent there, but to get back to what I was saying, I guessed that the system Aloha had made worked something like Doraemon’s Pebble Hat. In other words, phones hadn’t really disappeared from the world. It’s just that nobody noticed them anymore. People had fallen into a collective trance. The Devil was in fact “pulling a Doraemon.”

  As the long months and years go by, phones will gradually cease to exist completely. Like pebbles on the roadside, they will start by going unnoticed—until they disappear completely.

  When you think about it, the 107 people who met Aloha before me must have made something disappear, but the thing is, the rest of us haven’t noticed. It’s as if without you realizing it, things you use in your everyday life, like your favorite coffee cup or the new socks you just bought, could disappear. And if you did realize, however much you looked for them, you wouldn’t be able to find them. For all we know, there may be all kinds of things that have already disappeared without our having noticed it, things that we’d assumed would always be around.

  The green tram climbed two hills and finally reached the town next door. The station I got off at opened out onto a large square. From there I headed for where we’d arranged to meet.

  At the center of the square stood a clock tower. We used to meet here when we were in college. There was a roundabout that circled the clock tower, and nearby lots of restaurants, bookshops, and those old shops that sell odds and ends.

  I was fifteen minutes early. Normally I would have checked my phone at this point, but instead I pulled a small paperback out of my pocket and began to read as I waited for her to get there.

  The time came, but she didn’t show up. Then half an hour went by and she still hadn’t arrived.

  Damn.

  Without thinking I put my hand in my pocket in search of my phone. It wasn’t there. Phones had disappeared from the world.

  Had I gotten the place wrong? Or were we supposed to meet at a different time? I started to despair—all of the information I needed was in the phone I’d been using when I made the deal with the Devil. There was a good chance I’d got the time wrong.

  “Damn. What a pain in the ass,” I muttered out loud.

  I was supposed to have been liberated from my phone, but as it turned out, I needed it after all. There was nothing I could do. So I just stood there shivering under the clock tower.

  Come to think of it, back then I often found myself muttering the same words. That was back when I was going out with her in college. She was from the big city, but came to this small town out in the sticks to go to college. She was majoring in philosophy. I remember the house where she lived all alone, the electric fan and the small space heater. And all the books. She had lots of books. Even in those days everyone had a mobile phone, that’s how we got in touch with each other and communicated—everyone except her. She didn’t even have a landline at the house she rented. When she called me it was always from a pay phone.

  Whenever I saw the words “telephone booth” light up on the screen of my mobile phone, I would be beside myself with happiness. I would always pick up quickly and talk to her no matter where I was—in class or at my part-time job.

  The worst part was when I missed a call. All I could do was stare helplessly at the incoming call history. I couldn’t even call back because it had come from a public phone. I had nightmares about empty telephone boxes where the phone rang forever and no one ever answered.

  After a while, I started sleeping with my phone, holding it tight against me so I wouldn’t miss a call from her. The warmth of the phone I held close to me in bed reminded me of the warmth of her body. I always slept deeply that way.

  After we had been seeing each other for about six months, I finally managed to convince her to get a landline installed at her house. So she hooked up one of those old vintage rotary phones in classic black.

  “I got it for f
ree!” she bragged to me as she demonstrated the dialing action, which made a loud sound.

  I called that old phone so many times the number was seared into my brain. It was like it became part of me.

  It’s strange how that works. Out of all the numbers stored in my mobile phone I never memorized even one. I can’t remember the numbers of close friends or colleagues, or even my parents. I had left the work of memory and even my ties to other human beings to my mobile phone. I no longer bothered to memorize anything. When you think about it, mobile phones have done something pretty scary to the human brain.

  Yesterday as I was sat on the stairs, I tried to think of any number that my memory had held on to tightly enough for it to have become part of me, a physical part of me. Naturally it was her number that came to me. It seems that in the end, I had instinctively relied on my own memory.

  It had been seven years since we broke up, but there was still something I needed to ask her.

  She answered the phone—I couldn’t believe she actually still had the same number. She was working at a movie theater in her hometown and the next day just happened to be her day off. I thanked God for this coincidence, and arranged to meet her.

  “OK. See you tomorrow.”

  Her voice hadn’t changed at all since we were in college. I felt as if I’d gone back in time.

  I waited for an hour below the clock tower until my feet got so cold I thought they had become a part of the pavement. Then she finally arrived, marching toward me.

  She hadn’t changed a bit. How she dressed, her walk . . . it was all the same. The only thing that was different was that she had cut her shoulder-length hair and now wore it short.

  She noticed how pale my face was and seemed worried.