Izumi

Izumi is the narrator’s colleague, lover, and companion during his self-exile on a Greek island in “Man-Eating Cats.” Their relationship is built on unusually complete mutual understanding and on a shared conviction that it can remain separate from their marriages. When Izumi disappears from the house in the middle of the night, that confidence gives way to absence and to the narrator’s growing estrangement from himself; her voice returns in his mind as the story’s image of the cats consuming their owner.

Identity and Introduction

Izumi is ten years younger than the narrator. They meet at a business meeting and continue to see one another while working on a joint project. Their early meetings are brief and professional, with other people present. When the project ends, however, the narrator feels a profound loneliness, as though something vital has been taken from him; he thinks Izumi feels the same.

A week later, a call to the narrator’s office about a minor matter leads them to talk and then meet for drinks. The narrator recalls being able to understand what Izumi wanted to say with unusual clarity, while ideas he struggled to communicate to other people seemed to reach her precisely. The account distinguishes this connection from ordinary romantic love: both are married, love and respect their spouses, and experience their bond as an exceptional form of empathy.

An Intimacy Kept Apart

The two begin meeting regularly. Izumi’s husband works late, giving her freedom to come and go, and their conversations often last until the pair realize they may barely catch the last train. The time together seems insufficient because there is always more they want to tell each other.

Their emotional closeness develops into a sexual relationship, but the narrator presents sex as an extension of conversation rather than as the central source of pleasure. Their most intimate moments, as he describes them, are the quiet talks afterward, when they share secrets in a private language. The relationship’s defining feature is thus not a plan to replace their marriages but the feeling that each can communicate with the other without the usual limits.

Izumi and the narrator believe they can preserve this bond indefinitely while keeping their married lives intact. They see the two relationships as separate parts of life and assume the affair will not be discovered. The narrator acknowledges that he lies to his wife when returning home late and sometimes feels a pang of conscience, even as he denies to himself that this amounts to betrayal. That compartmentalization is a fragile arrangement: Izumi’s husband learns of the affair, questions her, and confronts the narrator’s wife at home. The narrator can no longer conceal what happened and tells his wife the truth, insisting that his relationship with Izumi is different from his marriage.

Life on the Island

During their exile on the island, Izumi and the narrator establish a modest daily routine. On sunny days they walk to the harbor, buy an English-language newspaper, and sit at the café next to the tax office. The narrator summarizes in Japanese any article that catches his attention. Izumi speaks English fluently enough to read the newspaper herself, but she never does so during this routine.

She explains that she has dreamed since childhood of sitting in a sunny place, looking at the sky or sea, while someone reads aloud to her. The choice of text does not matter; what matters is being read to, an experience she says she has never had. She also tells the narrator that she loves his voice. His reading aloud therefore becomes a form of companionship, and the daily ritual gives their life together a structure shaped less by practical necessity than by shared attention.

One article concerns a seventy-year-old woman living alone in a small Athens suburb with three cats. After the woman collapses and dies, her body goes undiscovered for a week. With the doors and windows closed and no food available, the trapped cats eventually eat her. The narrator reads the story to Izumi as part of their routine. Its details return later, linking the ordinary act of reading together to the story’s unsettling image of disappearance and consumption.

Disappearance and Narrative Significance

In the middle of the night, the narrator wakes and discovers that Izumi is gone. He checks the bedroom and the other rooms, then looks out into the front yard, where the two lounge chairs are empty. He calls her first quietly and then more loudly, but receives no answer. The episode is framed through his alarm and the objects left behind: two cigarette butts, an empty packet, and the empty house. The account does not explain where Izumi has gone.

The absence unsettles the narrator’s sense of his own identity. Later, under the moonlight, he experiences himself as a substitute rather than a real person, and his thoughts echo the earlier newspaper article. Izumi’s voice appears in his mind with the assertion, “The real you has been eaten by the cats.” He recognizes that he has heard the voice in his head, not from the surrounding landscape. The line joins the old woman’s fate to the narrator’s fear that his own self has vanished, while keeping Izumi’s actual whereabouts unresolved.

Izumi’s role in the story consequently shifts from an intimate partner who seems to offer complete understanding to an absent figure whose remembered voice gives shape to the narrator’s crisis. The newspaper ritual, her wish to be read to, and the story of the cats all converge after she disappears. Their bond had seemed capable of existing outside the consequences of ordinary life; the affair’s exposure and Izumi’s unexplained absence leave the narrator unable to sustain that separation or to feel certain of himself.