Cats

Cats recur in the book in sharply different circumstances: as familiar domestic animals, as dependents whose survival can turn against their owner, and as figures through which people confront loss and uncertainty about the self. The contrast between routine care and sudden disappearance gives them a significance beyond their place in ordinary household life.

Domestic Animals and Daily Routine

In one restaurant, the owner’s dinner arrives by a fixed nightly ritual: at eight, the manager leaves the busy dining room to take a cart to the owner’s room, then returns later with the empty dishes. Chicken is always the main course. The recipe and vegetables change, but chefs’ experiments do not alter the owner’s response; even a week of identical roast chicken brings no complaint. After successive attempts to impress him, the chefs settle on an ordinary chicken dish. Here, the cat is not present, but the story’s attention to routine and unvarying appetite helps frame the book’s wider interest in animals and human habits.

The same broad association of food with ordinary life appears in the narrator’s account of 1971, which he calls the Year of Spaghetti. He cooks spaghetti as a daily preoccupation, equipping himself with a large aluminum pot, a kitchen timer, spices, tomatoes, and a pasta cookbook. Cats are not part of this episode; its relevance to their recurring appearances lies in the book’s close attention to how food organizes a life, a contrast made more consequential when nourishment becomes a question of survival in the Athens report.

The Athens Newspaper Report

While living with Izumi on a Greek island, the narrator reads aloud a newspaper story about a seventy-year-old woman in a suburb of Athens. She lived alone with three cats in a one-room apartment. After she apparently suffered a heart attack and collapsed on her sofa, a week passed before her body was discovered. The windows and door had been shut, the cats had no food, and they could not open the refrigerator. Near starvation, they ate their owner’s body.

The report leaves a question unanswered: what happened to the cats afterward? Izumi wonders whether the authorities killed them for eating human flesh or treated them as animals driven by hunger and released them. The narrator has no answer. His suggestion that they might be sent to an institution and made vegetarian does not settle the matter; Izumi does not laugh, and instead recalls a lesson from her strict Catholic school. A nun asked students to imagine being stranded on a deserted island with a cat and enough provisions for one person to survive for about ten days. The nun instructed them to keep the food for themselves, on the grounds that humans were precious beings chosen by God and the cat was not. Izumi remembers the lesson as an unsettling instance of human beings assigning themselves greater worth than animals.

The article also makes the narrator’s ordinary reading practice part of the scene. He translates newspapers into Japanese for Izumi, although she can read English; she says she has long wished for someone to read aloud to her, and that she loves his voice. After the story, bees hover over spilled jam at their table. For a fleeting moment, their feeding and the cats’ desperate survival become one image in the narrator’s mind, and his sense of where he is slips toward unreality. The cats’ fate remains unknown, but the story has already crossed from news into the couple’s intimate conversation and the narrator’s disturbed perception.

Izumi’s Questions and the Narrator’s Lost Cat

A few days later, the narrator recalls a cat from his childhood. When he was in second or third grade, his family lived in a company house with a large garden and an old, towering pine tree. One day, while he read on the back porch, he watched the tortoiseshell cat playing by itself. Its behavior became increasingly strange to him: it leapt about as if frightened by something he could not see, ran around the tree, and climbed into its highest branches. The narrator called, but the cat did not respond.

He cannot remember the cat’s name. As evening darkened, he waited for it to climb down; it never returned, and the family never saw it again. Izumi offers a practical possibility: cats sometimes disappear, particularly when in heat, and the cat may simply have come down and gone elsewhere while the boy was not watching. The adult narrator can accept that explanation, but the child he remembers believed the cat had chosen to live in the tree and must have had a reason it could not descend. He sat on the porch day after day, hoping to see its face among the branches. The story does not establish what happened to the animal; it preserves the difference between a plausible explanation and the child’s enduring sense of an unresolved departure.

Cats and Unstable Identity

The Athens story returns in a more inward form during the narrator’s solitary walk on the island. At a moment when he feels that his identity and even his body are unreal, Izumi’s voice appears in his mind with the claim that the real narrator has been eaten by the cats. He recognizes that the voice is an illusion, not something spoken aloud around him. Yet the thought takes hold: later, unable to sleep, he imagines the cats from the newspaper story surviving while his real self has died and they consume him.

The connection between the three cats in Athens and the narrator’s imagined destruction is not a revelation about the animals’ actual fate. It is a disturbing mental image that converts an unanswered newspaper question into a crisis of self-recognition. The book gives the cats no access to explain their hunger or actions; instead, their presence unsettles the boundary between human and animal, reality and imagination, and a self that feels secure and one that seems to have vanished.

Recurrence and Meaning

Across these episodes, cats are associated with appetites that cannot be explained away by routine. The Athens cats are trapped without food and act under the pressure of hunger; the childhood cat disappears into a tree and leaves its young observer without an answer; the imagined cats become agents in the narrator’s fear that his identity has already been lost. Each case withholds certainty, though in different ways: the report cannot say what became of the animals, the memory cannot establish where the pet went, and the narrator knows that the voice and its claim are unreal while still feeling their force.

The cat story also exposes a moral hierarchy rather than offering a neat judgment. Izumi’s remembered lesson explicitly ranks human life above animal life, while the Athens report places that belief beside the cats’ dependence on a human owner and the consequences of being left without food. The recurring cats thus remain both animals with practical needs and figures caught in human questions about responsibility, survival, and what makes a self distinct. Their significance comes from the unresolved gap between what people can observe, what they assume, and what they cannot know.