I

I am a cat. As yet I have no name.

　I have no idea where I was born. All I remember is that I was mewing and mewing in some dark, damp place. It was there that I first laid eyes on what is called a human being. And what I later learned was that this particular specimen belonged to the most savage of all human varieties, known as a student. I have heard that students sometimes catch us and eat us boiled. Yet at the time I hadn't the faintest notion of any of this, and so I felt no particular fear. All I recall is a vague, floating sensation as I was scooped up and lifted in his palm. When I had calmed down a little and looked at the student's face while resting in his hand, that was what I suppose you might call my first glimpse of a human being. What struck me as exceedingly odd at the time still strikes me the same way today. First: the face, which ought to be decorated with hair, was instead as smooth and shiny as a kettle. In the many years since, I have encountered a good number of cats, but I have never once come across such a peculiar deformity. What is more, the center of the face protrudes to a quite extraordinary degree, and from the holes in this protrusion there issue from time to time small puffs of smoke, which are rather choking and most disagreeable. I have only recently learned that this is what humans call tobacco.

　For some time I sat quite comfortably in the palm of the student's hand, but then he began to move at tremendous speed. Whether the student was moving or only I was moving I could not tell, but my head began to spin uncontrollably and I felt sick to my stomach. I had resigned myself to death when there was a great thud and sparks flew before my eyes. That much I remember; beyond that, try as I might to recollect, I cannot.

　When I next came to my senses, the student was gone. Of the many brothers who had been with me there was not a single one to be seen. Even my mother had disappeared. And on top of that, everything was bright beyond all reason — so bright I could barely keep my eyes open. Something is very wrong, I thought, and crawled out to investigate, only to find myself in great pain. I had been tossed from a bed of straw straight into a bamboo thicket.

　I managed to drag myself out of the thicket, and beyond it lay a large pond. I sat before the pond and considered what was to be done. No particular plan presented itself. After a while I thought that perhaps if I cried, the student might come back for me. I tried mewing — mew, mew — but no one came. The wind rippled across the pond and the sun began to sink. I was terribly hungry. I wanted to cry but had no voice left. There was nothing for it but to resolve to walk toward wherever there was food, so I set off slowly, circling the pond to the left. The going was dreadful. But I forced myself on, dragging my body along, until at last I came to a place that smelled of human beings. If I could get in there, something might turn up — and thinking this, I crept through a gap in a broken bamboo fence into someone's garden. How strange the workings of fate: had that fence not been broken, I might well have starved to death at the roadside. There is truth in the saying that even a single tree can provide shade. That gap in the fence remains to this day my route whenever I visit the tortoiseshell next door. So I had crept into the garden, but what to do next I had no idea. It grew dark; I was hungry; the cold was fierce and rain began to fall — there was no longer a moment to spare. With no other recourse I simply walked in the direction that seemed warmest and brightest. Looking back on it now, I was already inside the house by then. And it was there that I again had the opportunity to encounter human beings other than the student. The first one I met was the maid O-san, who was rougher than the student before her — the moment she saw me she seized me by the scruff of the neck and flung me outside. This will not do, I thought, so I closed my eyes and trusted myself to fate. But the hunger and the cold were truly beyond endurance. I waited until O-san was off guard and crept back into the kitchen. I was promptly flung out again. I was flung out and crept back, crept back and was flung out — this same cycle, I believe, was repeated four or five times. I came to thoroughly detest O-san in that moment. The satisfaction of getting my revenge later by stealing her mackerel finally set my mind at rest. The last time I was about to be thrown out, the master of the house emerged, crying, "What is all this racket?" The maid dangled me in his direction and explained that this homeless little kitten kept coming into the kitchen no matter how many times she put it out. The master twirled the dark mustache beneath his nose, regarded my face for a while, then said, "Well, in that case, let it stay," and went back inside. He appeared to be a man of few words. The maid flung me into the kitchen with a look of great dissatisfaction. And so it was that I at last decided to make this household my home.

　My master rarely comes face to face with me. He is, I am told, a teacher by profession. When he returns from school he shuts himself in his study for the rest of the day and seldom emerges. The family believes him to be a great scholar. He himself makes a show of being a great scholar. In truth, however, he is nothing like as diligent as the family supposes. I sometimes steal into his study to observe him, and I frequently find him fast asleep. From time to time he drools onto the open book before him. He suffers from a weak stomach; his skin has a pale yellowish tinge, and shows the signs of a sluggish, unelastic constitution. Yet in spite of this he eats enormous meals. After eating enormously he takes Takadiastase. After taking Takadiastase he opens a book. After reading two or three pages he becomes drowsy. He drools on the book. This is his nightly routine, repeated without variation. Being a cat, I nonetheless find myself reflecting on this from time to time: how remarkably easy a teacher's life must be. If one is born human, one cannot do better than to become a teacher. If sleeping so much is sufficient, then even a cat could manage it. For all that, the master will tell you, whenever a friend visits, that there is nothing more wretched than teaching, and he never tires of complaining.

　When I first moved into this house I was exceedingly unpopular with everyone other than the master. Wherever I went I was rebuffed, with no one to take any interest in me. The degree to which I was disregarded is plain from the fact that, to this day, no one has troubled to give me a name. Having no alternative, I made it my business to stay as close as possible to the master, who at least had seen fit to take me in. In the mornings when he reads the newspaper, I invariably climb onto his lap. When he takes his afternoon nap, I invariably curl up on his back. This is not particularly because I like the master; there was simply no one else to turn to. In time, from accumulated experience, I have established the following schedule: mornings on the rice bucket, evenings on the kotatsu, fine days spent sleeping on the veranda. The most comfortable of all, however, is to burrow into the children's bedding at night and sleep alongside them. These children — one is five and the other three — sleep together in one bed in one room at night. I always manage to find a gap between them and wriggle in somehow, but if one of the children should wake up, dire consequences follow. The children — the smaller one especially has the worse temperament — immediately start crying at the top of their voices in the middle of the night, shouting "The cat's here, the cat's here!" At which point the master, with his nervous, dyspeptic constitution, invariably snaps awake and comes flying out from the next room. Not long ago I was thoroughly spanked with a ruler.

　The more I observe human beings in cohabitation with them, the more I find myself compelled to declare that they are a thoroughly selfish lot. As for the children with whom I sometimes share a bed — they are quite beyond description. When they feel like it they turn me upside down, put bags over my head, toss me across the room, and stuff me into the kitchen stove. Yet if I so much as raise a paw in response, the entire household unites to chase and torment me. Not long ago I scratched the tatami ever so slightly and the mistress flew into a rage, barring me from the sitting room to this day. She is entirely unmoved when I shiver on the kitchen floor. My esteemed neighbor Shirō tells me, every time we meet, that there is nothing more heartless in the world than a human being. Shirō gave birth to four beautiful kittens just the other day. But the student in that house, on the third day, took them all to the pond out back and threw in every last one. Shirō told me all of this with tears flowing, and added that if cats are ever to enjoy to the full the love between parent and child and live a beautiful family life, we must go to war with human beings and exterminate them. I think every word of it is perfectly reasonable. Likewise, our neighbor Miké is deeply indignant, saying that human beings have no conception of property rights. Among our own kind, it is established that whoever discovers a dried sardine head or the belly of a mullet first has the right to eat it, and if the other party refuses to abide by this rule, recourse to force is entirely legitimate. Yet human beings seem to have not the slightest understanding of this principle, and whatever delicacies we find are invariably plundered by them. They rely on their superior strength to take by force what should rightfully be ours, without the least compunction. Shirō lives in a military household and Miké's master is a lawyer. As I live only in a teacher's house, I tend, in matters such as these, to be rather more philosophical than either of them. So long as each day passes somehow, that will do. Even human beings cannot go on flourishing forever. Better to take the long view and wait for the age of the cat.

　Speaking of selfishness, let me relate a story of how my master suffered a failure through precisely that quality. This master is not outstanding at anything in particular, yet he is always eager to dabble in everything. He composes haiku and submits them to Hototogisu; he writes new-style poetry for Myōjō; he writes English so full of mistakes it is painful to behold; at one point he becomes passionate about archery, at another he takes up Noh chanting, at yet another he tortures a violin into producing a series of dull honking sounds — and the unfortunate thing is that none of it ever amounts to anything. For all that, once he begins, the man applies himself with an intensity remarkable for someone with a weak stomach. He chants Noh in the privy; despite being christened "the Privy Professor" by the neighbors, he continues blithely on, repeating over and over his favorite passage, "I am Taira no Munemori" — and people nearly burst out laughing at the mere mention of Munemori. Whatever had come over him, on some pay-day about a month after I moved in, he came hurrying home with a large parcel under his arm. What had he bought? Watercolor paints, brushes, and a pad of Whatman paper — clearly he had resolved to give up chanting and haiku and take up painting from this day forward. And true enough, for quite some time afterward he shut himself in his study every single day, not even pausing for his afternoon nap, and painted and painted. Yet when one looked at the results, no one could identify what he had painted. Apparently he himself felt it was not going well, for one day when his friend who studied aesthetics came to call, I overheard the following exchange.

"I can't seem to paint worth a damn. Looking at other people's work it seems simple enough, but the moment I pick up a brush myself I find it suddenly impossibly difficult." This was the master's lament. A candid enough confession. His friend looked at the master's face over his gold-rimmed spectacles and said: "Well, you can hardly expect to paint well right from the start. For one thing, you can't paint by sitting indoors and imagining things. Long ago, the Italian master Andrea del Sarto said: if you wish to paint, copy nature as it is, in everything. In the sky there are stars. On the earth there is dew and flowers. In the air fly birds. On the ground run beasts. In ponds are goldfish. On bare branches perch winter crows. Nature is one great, living painting. If you want to paint something that looks like painting, why not try sketching from life?"

"Oh, did Andrea del Sarto really say that? I had no idea. Well, he is quite right. Absolutely right." The master was enormously impressed. Behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, a faintly mocking smile could be seen.

　The very next day, I was enjoying my customary nap on the veranda when the master, most unusually, emerged from his study and began to busy himself behind me. I woke half-awake and peeked through narrowed eyes to see what he was doing — and there he was, playing Andrea del Sarto with total absorption. I could not suppress a smile at the sight. Stung by his friend's teasing, he had set out to sketch from life, and his very first subject was me. I had already slept quite enough and was dying to yawn. But the master was holding his brush with such ardent concentration that I thought it would be unkind to move, and so I held myself rigidly still. He was now completing my outline and adding color to the area around my face. I confess freely: as a cat I am by no means in the front rank. I make no claim to superiority over other cats in my figure, the quality of my coat, or the arrangement of my features. But however plain I may be, I cannot possibly look as strange as the creature now taking shape beneath my master's brush. For one thing, the colors are all wrong. I possess the pale grey coat tinged with yellow, patterned with lacquer-black markings, of a Persian cat — this much, I believe, no one who has ever seen me could dispute. Yet in my master's rendering, the color is neither yellow nor black, neither grey nor brown, nor any mixture of these; it can only be described as "a color," and nothing more can be said of it. And stranger still, there are no eyes. This is understandable, since the subject was sleeping; but not even the suggestion of eyes is visible, making it impossible to determine whether the creature depicted is a blind cat or a sleeping cat. I secretly thought to myself that even Andrea del Sarto himself could not have done anything with this. But the earnestness of the effort commands admiration. I had hoped to stay still as long as possible, but I had been needing to answer nature's call for some time, and the muscles inside my body were beginning to squirm and twitch. Unable to hold on a moment longer, I rudely stretched both legs out in front, lowered my head, and let out an enormous yawn. Having gone this far, there was no point in behaving myself any longer — since the master's plans were already ruined anyway, I might as well go round to the back to attend to my business, and so I began to pad away. The master, in a voice that mingled disappointment and rage, bellowed from inside the room: "You idiot!" When the master loses his temper he invariably calls people idiots — it is his one and only curse, which he resorts to for want of any other. But I think it exceeding rude to shout "idiot" indiscriminately at someone who has been holding himself still at considerable personal inconvenience. If he had been even a little gracious on the occasions when I climb onto his back, I might have been prepared to accept such abuse, but when he has never once done anything for my comfort, to call me an idiot merely for getting up to relieve myself is too much. Human beings are all drunk on their own self-importance. Unless something a little stronger than themselves comes along to keep them in check, there is no telling how far their presumption will carry them.

　If selfishness were only to this degree I could endure it, but I have been made privy to reports of human wickedness several times more lamentable than this.

　Behind my master's house there is a tea garden of some ten tsubo. It is not large, but it is a neat, pleasant spot that gets good sun. Whenever the children make too much noise for a peaceful nap, or whenever I feel dull and out of sorts, I invariably come here to restore my spirits. It was on a mild, still day in early winter, around two o'clock in the afternoon — I had slept well after lunch and was taking a stroll through the tea garden by way of exercise. Sniffing at the roots of the tea plants one by one, I had come up to the cedar hedge on the west side, when I found a large cat lying dead to the world on top of some trampled chrysanthemum stalks. He seemed entirely unaware of my approach, or if he was, he was quite unconcerned — he was lying fully extended, snoring magnificently. I could not help secretly marveling at the sheer audacity of someone who could sleep so serenely in another person's garden. He was a pure black cat. The sun, now just past its meridian, cast transparent rays upon his coat, so that a kind of invisible fire seemed to blaze up from between the gleaming, silken hairs. He had the great physique of what one might call a king among cats. He was certainly twice my size. I stood before him, lost in admiration and curiosity, gazing my fill, when a breath of quiet winter wind stirred the branches of the paulownia tree above the cedar hedge, and two or three leaves fluttered down into the withered chrysanthemums. The king snapped open his great round eyes. I still remember them. Those eyes shone far more beautifully than the amber so prized by human beings. He did not stir a muscle. From the depths of those two eyes he focused a piercing light upon my diminutive forehead and said: "What in the hell are you?"

　For a king, his language was a trifle low, I thought — but his voice held in its depths a force sufficient to humble a dog, and I was considerably alarmed. Nevertheless, not to greet him at all seemed dangerous, so I replied as coolly as I could while trying to appear composed: "I am a cat. As yet I have no name." My heart, however, was at that moment beating considerably harder than usual.

　He regarded me with supreme contempt. "What? A cat? Don't make me laugh. Where exactly do you live?" He was outrageously overbearing. "I live in the teacher's house here." "Thought as much. You're dreadfully thin, aren't you?" The king was breathing out fire worthy of his station. From his manner of speaking he did not seem to be a cat from a respectable household. But judging by his sleek plumpness, he clearly ate well and lived comfortably. I could not help asking: "And who might you be?" "I'm Kuro, from the rickshaw man's place," he replied with lordly nonchalance. Kuro of the rickshaw man's house was a rough-and-tumble cat known throughout the neighborhood. But being merely a rickshaw cat, he had nothing but brute strength and not an ounce of cultivation, so few bothered to associate with him. He was an object of universal polite avoidance. On hearing his name, I felt both a slight awkwardness and a degree of contempt. I decided first to test how ignorant he really was, and put to him the following question:

"Which do you think is the greater — a rickshaw man or a teacher?"

"A rickshaw man's stronger, obviously. Just look at your master — nothing but skin and bone."

"You look quite strong yourself, being a rickshaw cat. I suppose you eat rather well at the rickshaw man's place."

"Ha! I can find food wherever I go, I can. You shouldn't just keep trotting around in this tea garden. Follow me for one month and you'd fatten up till nobody'd recognize you."

"I may take you up on that sometime. Still, it seems to me that the teacher's house is larger than the rickshaw man's."

"Don't talk rubbish. What good is a big house if it doesn't fill your belly?"

　He seemed considerably irritated, and his ears — sharp and angled as split bamboo — twitched rapidly as he stalked away in high dudgeon. That was the beginning of my acquaintance with Kuro of the rickshaw man's.

　Afterward I ran into Kuro frequently. Every time we met he breathed out the sort of fire befitting a rickshaw cat. The lamentable incident of human villainy that I mentioned hearing of was, in fact, related to me by Kuro.

　One day, as usual, Kuro and I were lying in the warm tea garden chatting of this and that. After he had repeated his habitual boasts as if they were fresh news, he turned to me with the following question: "How many mice have you caught?" I was prepared to acknowledge that, while I believed my intelligence to be considerably superior to Kuro's, in brute strength and courage I was no match for him whatsoever; but even so, when this question was put to me, I found it rather embarrassing. Yet facts are facts and there was no point in lying, so I answered, "To be honest, I've been meaning to but haven't caught one yet." Kuro's long whiskers, bristling out from the tip of his nose, quivered as he laughed heartily. Kuro, for all his boasting, has a certain deficiency that goes with it — he is an exceedingly manageable cat if you listen to his bluster with what sounds like admiration, purring appreciatively. I had grasped this trick very shortly after making his acquaintance, and in this instance too, rather than making a clumsy attempt at self-defense which would only worsen my position, I decided it would be better to let him air his own exploits and use them to muddy the waters. So I tamely offered: "Someone as experienced as you must have caught quite a few." And sure enough, he charged straight through the breach. "Not that many — thirty or forty, I suppose," he replied with evident satisfaction. He continued: "I'll take on a hundred or two hundred mice any day, but weasels are a different matter — had a terrible run-in with one." "Oh, really? Do tell," I urged. Kuro blinked his large eyes and said: "It was during last year's big housecleaning. My master crawled under the veranda with a bag of quicklime and a big weasel shot out in a panic — so I thought, this is my moment." "Mm," I said, showing admiration. "A weasel's just a big mouse after all. So I thought, the miserable creature, and chased it and finally cornered it in the gutter." "Well done," I applauded. "But when I went in for the kill the beast let off one final blast. The stench — I can't tell you. Ever since, the sight of a weasel turns my stomach." At this point, as if he could still smell last year's stench, he raised a foreleg and rubbed his nose two or three times. I felt a measure of sympathy. Thinking to cheer him up I said: "Still, a mouse would be done for if you so much as glared at it, surely. You're so expert at catching mice and eat so many of them that's why you're so fat and your coat is such a splendid color, I should think." This compliment, intended to restore Kuro's good humor, produced a strangely contrary effect. He heaved a great sigh and said: "When you think about it, what's the point. No matter how hard you work catching mice — there's no greater scoundrel in the world than a human being. They take every mouse you catch and carry it off to the police box. At the police box they don't know who caught them, so they hand over five sen every time. My master has made a yen and fifty sen off my labors already, and he's never given me a decent thing to eat. I tell you, human beings are well-dressed thieves." Even the unlettered Kuro was capable of reasoning this far, it seemed — he was quite furious, the hair on his back standing on end. I began to feel slightly uncomfortable and gracefully changed the subject and made my way home. From that moment on, I resolved never to catch a mouse. I did not, however, join Kuro's gang and go foraging for other delicacies either. Sleeping is far more pleasant than eating well. Living in a teacher's house, even a cat seems to take on the teacher's temperament. If I am not careful I may develop a weak stomach before long.

　Speaking of teachers: my master has lately apparently realized that there is no hope for him as a watercolorist, for he wrote the following entry in his diary on the first of December:

I met a Mr. ○○ for the first time at today's gathering. They say he has done a great deal of carousing in his time, and indeed he has the look of a man about town. A man of his type, being favored by women, probably did not so much choose the fast life as find himself compelled into it. I hear his wife is a geisha — how very enviable. As a rule, the majority of those who speak ill of libertines are people who lack the qualifications to be libertines themselves. Likewise, among those who fancy themselves men of pleasure, many lack those qualifications too. These latter pursue the life without any compulsion, purely of their own accord — much as I do with my watercolors, with no prospect of ever becoming proficient. Yet they congratulate themselves on being sophisticates. If the argument can be made that drinking at restaurants and visiting assignation houses makes one a sophisticate, then by the same logic I am entitled to call myself a capable watercolorist. Just as my watercolors would be better left unpainted, so a foolish sophisticate is far inferior to a genuine, unaffected bumpkin.

　The theorizing on sophistication is rather hard to endorse. And the desire for a geisha wife is a foolishly undignified sentiment for a teacher to voice; but the self-criticism regarding his own watercolors is perfectly sound. For all this self-knowledge, his vanity remains quite ineradicable. Two days later, on the fourth of December, his diary reads:

Last night I dreamed that I had left a watercolor I had painted — certain it would come to nothing — lying somewhere about the house, and that someone had framed it handsomely and hung it in the transom. When I looked at it in the frame it seemed to me that I had suddenly become quite good. I was tremendously pleased. This is really rather fine, I thought, and spent the whole time admiring it, when morning came and I woke up, and it became clear with the morning light that I was still just as bad a painter as before.

　It appears that even in his dreams the master cannot shake his obsession with watercolors. At this rate, he will never be a watercolorist — let alone the sophisticate he professes to aspire to.

　The day after the master dreamed of watercolors, the aesthetician with the gold-rimmed spectacles paid his first visit in some time. The moment he sat down he opened with: "Well, how goes the painting?" The master assumed an unconcerned expression and replied: "Following your advice, I've been making a point of sketching from life, and I must say it does make one notice details of shape and subtle variations of color that one had never perceived before. I imagine that's why Western painting has advanced as it has through the centuries, thanks to the tradition of insisting on sketching from nature. Andrea del Sarto was right, after all." Not a word about the diary, and here he was, admiring Andrea del Sarto all over again. The aesthetician smiled and said, scratching his head: "Actually, old fellow — I made that up." "Made what up?" The master had still not grasped that he had been deceived. "What do you mean, what — this Andrea del Sarto you've been so deeply impressed by. I invented that story on the spot. I never imagined you'd take it so seriously — ha ha ha ha." He was in transports of delight. I was listening to this exchange from the veranda and could not help imagining what today's diary entry would be. This aesthetician's sole pleasure in life is to scatter random fabrications and fool people. Apparently not in the least concerned with what effect the Andrea del Sarto affair had had on the master's feelings, he prattled on in high spirits: "The amusing thing about telling a tall tale is watching someone take it seriously — it stimulates a wonderful comic aesthetic sensibility. The other day I told a student that Nicholas Nickleby had advised Gibbon to give up writing his great life's work, the History of the French Revolution, in French and publish it in English instead — and the wretched student had such a memory that at a meeting of the Japan Literary Society he stood up and repeated in all earnestness exactly what I had told him. Most comic. About a hundred people in the audience, and they all listened with the most solemn attention. And then there is another good story. Recently, at a gathering that included a certain man of letters, someone mentioned Harrison's historical novel Theophano, and I remarked that it was the finest of all historical novels — that the scene where the heroine dies was particularly hair-raising. And the gentleman sitting across from me, who never admits to being unfamiliar with anything, said: 'Yes, yes, that passage is truly magnificently written.' From which I concluded that this gentleman, like me, had never read the novel." The master, with his nervous, dyspeptic nature, opened his eyes wide. "But what if you say such things and the person has actually read the book?" The implication seemed to be: it's all very well to deceive people, but isn't it awkward when you're found out? The aesthetician was not in the least perturbed. "Oh, in that case one simply says one confused it with another book — that sort of thing," he said with a chuckle. This aesthetician, for all his gold-rimmed spectacles, shares certain characteristics with Kuro of the rickshaw man's. The master blew a smoke ring from his "Sunrise" tobacco in silence, with an expression that seemed to say: I lack the nerve for that sort of thing. The aesthetician, with a look that said "that's why your painting comes to nothing," continued: "But jokes aside, painting is genuinely difficult. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have advised his students to copy the stains on temple walls. Indeed, if you step into a privy and gaze at the water-damaged walls with an absorbed mind, you'll find some rather fine natural patterns forming on their own. Try noticing and sketching from them — you'll find something interesting comes of it." "You're making it up again, aren't you." "No, this one is absolutely genuine. Isn't it a striking observation? It sounds like something da Vinci himself would very well say." "It is a striking observation, I'll grant that," said the master, half conceding the point. He does not, however, appear to have yet resorted to sketching in the privy.

　Kuro of the rickshaw man's has since gone lame. His lustrous coat is gradually losing its sheen and falling out. Those eyes of his, which I once described as shining more beautifully than amber, are now full of sleep. What particularly caught my attention was the falling off of his vitality and the deterioration of his physique. The last day I met him in the tea garden, I asked how he was getting on, and he said: "The weasel's last blast and the fishmonger's carrying pole — I've had quite enough of both."

　The few leaves that had reddened between the red pines, vivid as something from a dream of other days, have scattered and gone; and the red and white sasanqua blossoms that had been dropping their petals one by one beside the stone basin have fallen to the last petal. On the south-facing veranda, three and a half rooms wide, the winter sun tilts early in the afternoon, and the days free of cold winds are growing rare — I feel as though the hours given to my afternoon nap have been curtailed.

　The master goes to school every day. He returns and barricades himself in his study. When visitors come, he says how much he detests teaching. He rarely paints watercolors anymore. He has declared Takadiastase ineffective and given it up. The children go to kindergarten faithfully without missing a day. They come home singing nursery songs, bouncing balls, and from time to time dangle me by my tail.

　I eat no special food and therefore grow no fatter, but I remain more or less in good health, without going lame, getting through one day after another. I will never catch a mouse. I still cannot abide O-san. No one has yet given me a name, but there is no end to wishing, and so I have resolved to end my days as a nameless cat in this teacher's household.