I Am a Cat

I am a cat. As yet I have no name. So begins the first novel of Natsume Sōseki, the talkative, tart and endlessly quotable story of a cat who lives in the household of a Tokyo schoolteacher and has decided, with great dignity, that he understands human beings better than they understand themselves.

His master, Kushami, is an English teacher with a weak stomach and a short temper, who falls asleep over his books and tries every hobby without finishing one. Around him gather the people the cat so closely observes: Meitei, a gentleman of leisure who tells the most elaborate lies with a perfectly straight face; Kangetsu, a young physicist who spends his days polishing glass beads; Tōfū, an earnest poet; Dokusen, a serene and goat-bearded philosopher; and, next door, the rich businessman Kaneda, whose wife's nose has made her famous. Very little happens in the ordinary sense. There are New Year visits, a burglar, a trip to the public bath, a feud with the boys of the middle school behind the house, and a great deal of talk, in which the learned are exposed, the vain are flattered into folly, and the cat takes notes.

The book first appeared in the magazine Hototogisu, beginning in January 1905, and ran in ten instalments until August 1906, by which time it had grown to eleven chapters. It was collected in three volumes between 1905 and 1907. Behind the jokes about pedants and profiteers lies the Japan of the war with Russia, newly confident, newly modern and not quite sure what it has traded away.