Noboru Wataya’s cat goes missing

Noboru Wataya’s cat goes missing for over a week, turning an absence in the household into the first thread leading Toru toward the vacant house and the Kanō sisters’ world of divination. The episode is grounded in ordinary domestic concern, but its competing explanations—Kumiko’s certainty that the cat is dead and the family’s search for its whereabouts through Malta Kano—give the disappearance an ominous, unresolved weight.

The Search Begins

Kumiko raises the missing cat during a telephone conversation with Toru, asking him to look around the neighborhood because it has been gone for more than a week. She has a specific lead: she is almost certain it has been lingering at the empty house at the far end of the alley, where a bird statue stands in the yard, and says she has seen it there several times. Her request gives Toru a concrete place to search, linking the absent animal to a vacant property that will matter beyond the search itself.

The cat has slipped from Toru’s attention during the morning, while Kumiko remains concerned about its prolonged absence. Their different levels of attention make the request more than a simple report: she is trying to enlist him in a search that he has not yet made his priority. The episode begins not with a sighting or a recovery, but with the practical question of whether he will look.

Kumiko’s Foreboding

Later, after his bath, Toru finds Kumiko sitting in the darkened living room. She says in a barely audible voice that she is sure the cat is dead. Toru rejects this conclusion and reassures her that it may be enjoying itself somewhere and will come home when it gets hungry, recalling that it had gone missing once before when they lived in Koenji.

Kumiko insists that this time is different. She imagines the cat rotting in a clump of grass and asks whether Toru searched the grass in the vacant house. The contrast between his hopeful, familiar explanation and her conviction of death leaves the disappearance unresolved while sharpening its emotional stakes: the empty house is no longer merely a place where the cat might be, but the setting of Kumiko’s worst suspicion.

A Family Search Through Malta Kano

The search also reaches Malta Kano. She explains that she asked to see Toru purely because of the missing cat: Kumiko had consulted her brother, Noboru Wataya, about the animal, and he in turn sought Malta’s advice. The chain of consultation connects Toru’s domestic problem to the Wataya family’s interest in divination and the interpretation of houses.

Toru understands from Malta’s explanation why she is involved, though he regards the family’s beliefs in divination and house physiognomy with skepticism. The missing cat therefore draws together two different approaches to uncertainty: Kumiko’s increasingly grim intuition and a consultation intended to establish what happened. The evidence records neither the cat’s fate nor the outcome of the neighborhood search; its disappearance remains an open question.