A young
couple (they are in their mid-thirties) rent a small house adjoining the large
home of their elderly landlord & landlady in a quiet and scenic alley. The
husband gives up his job in a publishing house to write. The wife is a proof-reader.
The book
appears to be largely autobiographical (there is a great deal of attention paid
to location details and descriptions of the geography of the area). The story
is written 10 years after the events described in the novel. The tone of the piece
is very nostalgic almost more retrospective in feel than you would expect from
someone writing this story in their mid-forties. There is a sense of poignancy
in the feeling of the passage of time, the unstoppable “flow of the Arno”. The
sense in which events unfold that the narrator can only analyse in retrospect
but whose import was lost on him at the time they occurred.
The
description of their home and that of the garden of the large house and the seasonal
changes are finely drawn. The narrator’s encounters with the natural world are
highlighted in the juxtaposition of the two tales – one of the dragonfly and
the other of the preying mantis. Nature is both gentle and deadly. The upside
down reflections of passersby in the window of their house seems to suggest the
mutability of the world outside the confines of their own home.
The couple’s nearest
neighbor acquires a stray cat (Chiba) the cat divides it’s time between the two
homes. The couple attempt to preserve that part of Chiba’s nature that is wild
and untamed, they have limited physical contact with her. They delight in her
aloofness. The husband who purports to care less for animals than his wife is
in fact the one who encourages the cat to spend time with them. At this time in
their lives the couple are unenthusiastically contemplating whether they will
have children or not. These are not people who wear their hearts on their
sleeves. The emotional restraint of the characters is reflected in the restraint
of the prose.
In the course
of the story there are three deaths of humans in the novel: the elderly
landlord, a poet friend and a well-known poet whose funeral clashes with the
memorial of the poet friend. We are told that:
“The word “to grieve” or “lament” in
Japanese is actually made up of two different kanji characters — “sadness” and
“resentment.”
The cat Chiba
also dies. The narrator attempts to engage with the neighbours in their grief
at the loss of Chiba, the neighbours apparently feel that the couple have invaded
the privacy of the family and unreasonably overstepped the bounds of social
interaction. The couple feel they have been deprived of an opportunity to
grieve the death of the cat.
The
conclusion of the story suggests that Chiba’s owners were not completely
truthful with the couple regarding Chiba’s death and the narrator suggests that
the neighbour was being dishonest.