I Am a Cat
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I Am a Cat (吾輩は猫である, Wagahai wa neko de aru) is a comic novel written in 1905-1906 by the Japanese author Natsume Soseki.
In I Am a Cat, a supercilious feline narrator describes the lives of a set of middle class Japanese. Amongst these are Mr. Sneeze (literally translated from Kushami Chinno in the original Japanese) and family (the cat's owners), Sneeze's garrulous and irritating friend Waverhouse (Meitei), and the young scholar Avalon Coldmoon (Kangetsu) with his will-he-won't-he marriage to the spoilt businessman's daughter, Opula Goldfield (Kaneda Tomiko). After two years chronicling the foibles of these foolish humans and the general superiority of cats, the nameless protagonist gets drunk and drowns in a water barrel.
I Am a Cat is satire on Japanese society in the time of the Meiji Emperor, the era following the country's re-establishment of contact with the outside world. Among its major themes are the period's uneasy mix of new Western ideas and Japanese traditions, and the aping of Western customs. The novel is striking for its modernity.
The book first appeared as a set of ten installments in the literary journal Hototogisu. Soseki had originally only intended to write the short story that forms the first chapter of I Am a Cat. He was persuaded to contribute further installments by Takahama Kyoshi, one of the editors of Hototogisu. The episodic nature in which it was written may account for the stylistic incongruities between the earlier and later chapters.
Note that the title of the novel has lost much in translation. In the original, it derives much of its humor from the fact that it uses pompous, formal wording wholly inappropriate to a housecat. It might be better translated to something like "Greetings, gentlemen: I hereby announce that I am a cat."
Trivia
- The impostor's story to be told by Waverhouse in the latter part of this novel is Robert Barr's The Absent-Minded Coterie(1906) clearly. Japanese mystery writer Yamada Futarou pointed it out in 1971.ja:吾輩は猫であるzh:我是猫