The Guest Cat

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.

The story is unremarkable, the day-to-day of anyone’s life, however I feel it is a masterpiece of understatement. I do wonder how much of the nuance of the story is lost in transla