Toru and Kumiko marry and adopt a cat

Toru and Kumiko marry and adopt a cat in the early part of their life together, making the kitten a tangible emblem of a home they have chosen to build. Found together in the rain during the week after their wedding, the cat links their shared beginning to Kumiko’s childhood longing for a pet and, much later, to the first crisis that sets Toru searching for it. Its importance lies not only in the animal’s disappearance but in what it carries: a rare instance of Kumiko getting something she had wanted, and a piece of married life she insists belongs to both of them.

The first cat and the beginning of a household

A few months after Toru and Kumiko discuss marriage, they marry and discover the kitten during the week that follows. Kumiko is on her way to meet Toru at the station, carrying an umbrella, when they encounter the animal in pouring rain. Someone has left it in a beer crate beside a liquor store. It is tiny and soaked; they take it in together. The memory is narrated years later by Kumiko, who recalls the circumstances in precise, affectionate detail: the rain, the crate, the journey home, and the two of them finding the kitten.

The discovery gives their marriage an immediate shared responsibility. When Kumiko later tells Toru that the cat is important to her—or, as she corrects herself, to both of them—she emphasizes that they found it together. The small animal therefore stands for more than her attachment to a pet: it is an early object of mutual care, bound to the couple’s first days as husband and wife. Kumiko calls it her very first cat, which makes the adoption a personal milestone as well as a domestic one.

Their household takes physical shape soon afterward in the house Toru’s uncle owns in Setagaya. The couple move there in the autumn of their second year of marriage, accepting nominal rent in exchange for agreeing to leave on three months’ notice when the uncle needs the property. It is a temporary arrangement, but its small yard and quiet neighborhood give them the feeling of belonging to a real household. The adopted cat belongs to this developing domestic life: a home that is modest and not fully theirs, yet made meaningful by the life they share within it.

Kumiko’s childhood longing and the meaning of choice

The cat’s importance becomes clearer in a conversation about Kumiko’s upbringing. When Toru asks whether she likes cats, she says she had wanted one desperately as a child, but her mother hated them and would not let her have one. Kumiko describes a wider pattern of being unable to obtain what she truly wanted. After a person has grown accustomed to never getting such things, she says, even the ability to know what one wants can disappear.

Toru responds by telling her that she is no longer a child and has the right to choose her own life. If she wants a cat, he says, she can choose a life in which she can have one. Kumiko fixes her eyes on his and agrees. The passage then moves forward to the couple talking about marriage a few months later. In retrospect, adopting the kitten gives concrete form to the choice they have discussed: Kumiko’s childhood deprivation is not undone in general, but one old wish is fulfilled in the life she begins with Toru.

That connection gives the adoption a quietly consequential place in the marriage’s history. The cat is both a beloved animal and evidence of a change in Kumiko’s circumstances—from a child whose wants were refused to an adult able to share a decision with her husband. Toru’s participation matters too: the animal is not merely something he permits Kumiko to have, but something they discover and take in together. Her later insistence that it is important to both of them preserves that shared origin.

The missing cat reopens the shared memory

Years later, the cat has been missing for ten days. Toru looks for it in the narrow alley behind the houses, a passage the neighborhood calls an alley despite its having neither a true entrance nor exit. It once connected two streets, but new houses squeezed it down; one end was screened off, the other sealed by a cinder-block wall, and a barbed-wire barrier blocked the remaining way through. Unused and overgrown, the passage became a buffer between back gardens. Kumiko has nevertheless been frequenting it, and Toru follows her request to search there for the cat.

The search becomes part of Toru’s daily routine even after Malta Kano tells him the cat is no longer in the neighborhood. On one rainy, uniformly gray morning, he chooses looking for the cat over going to the nearby pool. The alley is unnaturally quiet: his shoes make no sound on the grass, and he hears only a radio talk show briefly before its voices fade behind him. The search is thus rooted in a simple practical hope, but its setting also gives the domestic loss an uncanny atmosphere. Toru keeps returning to a narrow, nearly abandoned space because the missing animal matters to Kumiko and because it belongs to their shared past.

Kumiko tells Toru that the cat’s disappearance is why she called her brother, Noboru Wataya. She knows Toru dislikes asking him for anything, but hopes he may know a medium or clairvoyant who can locate a missing cat. Her explanation makes the stakes explicit: she cannot lose the first cat she ever had, the one she and Toru found together. The search therefore draws their private bond into contact with the brother from whom Toru is reluctant to seek help.

A domestic beginning recalled from darkness

The marriage’s origin returns in a later passage while Toru sits at the bottom of a well. In the darkness, his memories become unusually vivid, and he closes his eyes to recall first meeting Kumiko eight years earlier in a university hospital waiting room. The narrative’s movement from the present well to the memory of their first meeting, and from that meeting to their later marriage and the kitten, makes domestic history something Toru revisits from a place of isolation. The recollection does not erase the distance that has developed between them; it brings their shared beginning sharply into view against that distance.

The later state of the neighborhood compounds the contrast. After Toru emerges from the well, the vacant Miyawaki house has been demolished. In winter he sees only a high plank fence, compacted black earth, weeds, and the absence of the house, yard, well, trees, and bird sculpture. The passage that once led him to search for the cat has become a route past a vacant lot; Toru can hardly believe he once descended into the well there. By this point, the remembered kitten and the alley belong to different layers of his experience: one recalls a beginning made through shared care, the other records how familiar places can become strange and disappear.

The adoption is therefore a small but durable point of reference in the novel’s account of Toru and Kumiko’s marriage. Its significance is established through specific acts rather than abstract promises: Kumiko comes to meet Toru with an umbrella, the two find a soaked kitten in a discarded crate, and they take it home. When the cat later vanishes, Kumiko names it as a symbol of their shared life, while Toru turns that claim into repeated searches. The affection attached to the animal survives even as the couple’s home and relationship become increasingly unsettled.