Books: “I am a Cat” by Soseki Natsume

The cat with no name in this tome, is a self-taught intellectual that inwardly laughs at human folly and social convention. While his master, an English teacher, can be quite tiresome, his tiffs with his wife, and debates between his dysfunctional friends are hilarious. The book, wisen with poignant truths, can be frustratingly circumvent (ironically, or perhaps this is the true wit of the author, it mirrors a very long winded story within the novel about the purchase of a violin, which leaves all but one of its listeners to give up on hearing the end.) I myself tried to give up reading the book, but am glad I stuck through it, to learn the simplest of truths with the drunk cat’s watery end.
Because many of the jokes are the kind where the same sounding Japanese words are worked in as puns, the book in its original language will very probably offer another layer of comedy. That, however, will be a challenge, for another day…I’m sure the cat will understand my laziness.

“Considering how much has been achieved by the power of a single businessman, I am obliged to conclude that, though I’ll never know why the earth spins around in its axis, it’s certainly cash that motivates this world. None know better than businessmen what power money buys. It is by their nod that the sun comes up in the east and, by their decision, goes down in the west. I have been very slow to learn the divine right of businessmen, and I attribute my backwardness to the atmosphere, the cultural effluvia from the poor pig-headed schoolie, in which I have been reared.”

“No one at all will read your poems. Not because the poems are yours and you are a bad poet, but because individuality has intensified to such an extent that anything written by other people holds no interest for anyone. This stage of the literary future is already evidenced in England where two of their leading novelists, Henry James and George Meredith, have personalities so strong and so strongly reflected in their novels that very few people care to read them. And no wonder. Only readers with personalities of matching force could find such works of any interest.”

“Indeed, it is often the case that a phantom has more substance than a souless person”