The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles

As a prelude to my reading list for the Japanese Literature challenge I read the novella "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" by Kij Johnson, which can be read here (it is 64 pages). My appetite is now whetted for reading The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson as well as I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume; cats also frequently figure in the fiction of Haruki Murakami. Does anyone know of the cultural significance of cats in Japan? Is it just that they are a symbol of good luck or a more deep-rooted devotion?

I am a passionate cat-lover and adore reading about cats in fiction and one of my favourite novellas is "The Cat" by Colette. "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" is set in Imperial China and is about Small Cat who lives in a garden in the capital city with other female felines (Tom-cats visit) and share their lives together:

The cats shared another thing: their fudoki. The fudoki was the collection of stories about all the cats who had lived in a place. It described what made it a home, and what made the cats a family. Mothers taught their kittens the fudoki. If the mother died too soon, the other cats, the aunts and cousins, would teach the kittens. A cat with no fudoki was a cat with no family, no home, and no roots.

Small Cat's fudoki -her sense of self- is the essence of the story; when an earthquake and subsequent fire destroy her home and no other cats are left but her, Small Cat makes a pilgrimage to the North in search of other cats belonging to her fudoki. Her journey of a thousand miles is from the capital (still Tokyo?) to the North, beyond Mt Fuji (which is only 60 miles from Tokyo) to provinces that do not know cats and see them as demons where she encounters a Monk, a Bear Hunter, a Bear, Snow, cats belonging to a different fudoki, and a ferry journey for the first time. At her journey's end Small Cat has made her own fudoki - The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles - and realises that stories are not just told and learned but are made by ourselves. Anyone who loves cats, mythology, and the nature of stories will enjoy this lovely novella.

Everyone had a fudoki, Small Cat knew now. Everyone had their own stories, and the stories of their families and ancestors. There were adventures and love stories, or tricks and jokes and funny things that had happened or disasters. Everyone wanted to tell the stories, and to know where they fit in their own fudokis. She was not that different.

Claire from kiss a cloud described the entrancing, "solemnity and the subtlety" of Japanese literature and I think that is a beautiful way of describing the characteristic nature of its canon. The lyrical nature of Japanese literature in translation is beautiful and surreal, like a walk through cherry blossom.

I suspect that this short story is a shorter revision of Johnson's second novel, Fudoki, which Nymeth reviews here. For anyone wanting to read another Japanese short story about cats then this one by Haruki Murakami is good although it is practically identical to the middle section of his novel, Sputnik Sweetheart.

Some favourite passages:

It seemed to snow every few days, sometimes clumps heavy enough to splat when they landed,
sometimes tiny flakes so light they tickled her whiskers. Small Cat didn’t like snow: it looked like feathers, but it just turned into water when it landed on her.

There was not much for them to do but talk and sing, so they talked and sang a lot. They shared fairy tales and ghost stories. They told funny stories about themselves or the people they knew.
People had their own fudoki, Small Cat realized, though there seemed to be no order to the stories, and she didn’t see yet how they made a place home. They sang love-songs and funny songs about foolish adventurers, and Small Cat realized that songs were stories as well.