On reaching home, I find that all is peaceful. My master, his face still glowing from the bath, is quietly eating supper: but, catching sight of me as I jump up onto the veranda, he breaks his silence to remark, “What a happy-go-lucky cat! I wonder what he’s been up to, coming home as late as this.”
My master has little money, but I note that on the table tonight there are laden dishes for a three-course meal. Grilled fish will be one of them. I don’t know what the fish is called, but I guess it was probably caught in the sea off Shinagawa sometime yesterday. I have already expatiated at length upon the natural healthiness of fish as fostered by their salt environment; however, once a fish has been caught and boiled or, like this one, grilled, questions of environmental advantage are just no longer relevant. This fish would have done much better to stay alive in the sea, even if, in the course of time, it had eventually to suffer such ills as all fish-flesh is heir to. So thinking, I sat myself down beside the table.
I pretended not to look while looking; looking, in particular, for a chance to snatch a piece of anything edible. Those who do not know how to look while not looking must give up any hope of ever eating good fish. My master pecked in silence at the fish, but soon put down his chopsticks as if to say that he didn’t much like the taste. His wife, seated directly opposite him in matching silence, is anxiously watching how his chopsticks move up and down and whether my master’s jaws are opening and closing.
“I say,” he suddenly asked her, “give that cat a whack on the head.”
“What happens if I whack it?”
“Never you mind what happens: just whack it.”
“Like this?” asks his wife, tapping my head with the palm of her hand.
It didn’t hurt at all.
“Well, look at that! It didn’t give the least miaow.”
“No,” she says, “it didn’t.”
“Then whack it again.”
“It’ll be just the same, however often I try.” She gave me another tap on the head.
Since I still felt nothing, I naturally kept quiet. But what could be the point of these peculiar orders? As a prudent and intelligent cat, I find my master’s behavior utterly incomprehensible. Any person who could understand what he’s driving at, would then know how to react, but it’s not that easy. His wife is simply told to “whack it,” but she, the whack-er, is self-statedly at a loss to know why she should whack; I, the unfortunate whackee, am no less lost to understand what it’s all about. My master is becoming a little edgily impatient, for twice already his instructions have failed to produce the result which he only knows that he desires. It is therefore almost sharply that he says, “Whack it so that it miaows.”
His wife assumed a resigned sort of expression and wearily asking,
“Why on earth should you want to make the wretched thing miaow?”
gave me another, slightly harder, slap. Now that I know what he wants, it’s all absurdly easy. I can satisfy my master with a mere miaow, but it’s really rather depressing, not just to witness but actually to participate in, yet another demonstration of his addlepated conduct. If he wanted me to miaow, he should have said so. His wife would have been spared two or three totally unnecessary efforts, and I would not have needed to endure more than a single whack. An order to whack should only be given when only a whack is wanted, but in this case what was wanted was simply a miaow. Now whacking may indeed fall within his sphere of responsibility, but miaowing lies in mine. It’s a damned impertinence that he should dare to assume that an instruction to whack includes, or implies, an instruction to miaow, which is a matter totally within my discretion. If he is taking my miaows for granted, indeed he presumes too far. Such failure to respect another person’s personality, a deadly insult to any cat, is the sort of crude insensitivity which one must expect from creatures like my master’s own particular pet aversion, the nauseous Mr.
Goldfield. But the same behavior on the part of my master, a man so confident of his open-heartedness that he struts about stark-naked, can only be seen as an act of unwonted weakness. Yet, as I know, my master is not mean. From which it follows that his venture into whacking was not motivated by any deviousness or malice. In my opinion, his orders were hatched in a brain as guileless and dim as that of a mosquito larva.
If one gobbles rice, one’s stomach becomes full. If one is cut, one bleeds.
If one is killed, one dies. Therefore, such reasoning runs, if one is whacked, one must perforce miaow. Though I have done my best to justify my master’s ways toward me, I regret to be bound to point out the clottish absurdity of such a style of logic. For if one were to concur in that logic, it would follow that if one falls in a river, one is required to drown; that if one eats fried fish, one must then get the squatters; that if one gets a salary, one must turn up for work; and that if one studies books, one cannot fail to make oneself a great name in the world. If that were the way things worked, there’d be some a bit embarrassed. I, for instance, would find it annoying to be obliged to miaow when whacked.
What, I ask, would be the point of being born a cat if, like the bell-clock at Mejiro, one is expected to give off sounds every time one’s struck?
Having thus mentally reprimanded my presumptuous master, then and then only I obliged him with a mew.
As soon as I miaowed, my master turned to his wife. “Hear that?” he said. “Now tell me, is a miaow an interjection or an adverb?”