Noboru Wataya the cat goes missing

The disappearance of the Okadas’ cat is an early domestic crisis that opens into a larger uncertainty: the animal is not merely absent from its dish but, according to Malta Kano, beyond the reach of a search in the neighborhood. The episode gives Toru Okada a modest, concrete task while establishing the cat as the first missing presence around which the novel’s obscure currents gather. It also exposes an indirect chain of consultation linking Kumiko, her brother Noboru Wataya, and Malta.

A Household Disturbed

After Kumiko asks whether the cat has returned, Toru realizes he has not thought about it all morning. The sardines left in its dish remain untouched, and Kumiko asks him to look around the neighborhood because the cat has been gone for more than a week. Toru likes cats and cares about this one, but initially treats its absence according to an ordinary feline logic: a cat may choose to live somewhere else, and if it becomes tired and hungry, it may come home. He agrees to search chiefly because Kumiko wants him to, and because, newly out of work, he has little else to do.

That practical response does not relieve the unease. One evening Kumiko sits in the darkened living room and says she is sure the cat is dead. Toru argues that it may be enjoying itself somewhere and could return hungry, as it had after an earlier disappearance when they lived in Koenji. Kumiko rejects the comparison: this time, she says, it is dead and rotting in grass, and asks whether Toru has searched the vacant house. Her certainty turns a routine absence into a threatened loss, while the vacant house gives the search a specific, unsettling destination.

The Search and Its Limits

The cat’s absence recurs in the couple’s conversations even when other matters occupy them. During a later discussion, Kumiko tells Toru that a Miss Kano will call; Toru replies that she has already phoned, said their names—his, Kumiko’s, and Kumiko’s brother’s—and hung up without explaining herself. Kumiko’s advance notice and Malta’s cryptic call place the missing cat inside a network of concern that Toru does not yet understand.

When Toru meets Malta, she clarifies that the consultation is specifically about the cat. Noboru Wataya had sought her advice after Kumiko consulted him about the animal’s disappearance. Toru understands Malta to be a clairvoyant or channeler and notes that the Wataya family is interested in divination and the supposed physiognomy of houses. The route from a missing household pet to Malta therefore passes through both Kumiko and her brother, connecting an intimate domestic problem with the Watayas’ spiritual inquiries.

Malta does not resolve the mystery by locating the cat. She says she does not yet know whether it is alive, but is certain that it is no longer near the Okadas’ house and that Toru will never find it in that neighborhood. Her answer sets a firm limit on the search without explaining what has happened: the cat’s condition remains unknown, while its departure from the local area is presented as certain. In the tearoom, Toru hears this as rain falls beyond the windows and people move along the footbridge beneath low clouds.

Meaning of the Disappearance

The disappearance shifts the cat from a familiar household animal into an uncertain presence that resists both ordinary reassurance and expert prediction. Toru’s practical expectation—that hunger may bring it home—meets Kumiko’s conviction that it is dead, then Malta’s narrower but decisive claim that it cannot be found nearby. These accounts do not settle the animal’s fate; they establish competing limits on what the characters can know.

The episode also introduces Malta’s vocabulary of flow and obstruction. Asked why the cat has vanished, she says the flow may have changed or something may have obstructed it. She cannot yet confirm whether the animal is alive, but the altered flow offers a possible frame for its absence. The cat’s loss thus marks the point at which an everyday problem begins to touch the novel’s less visible order, without making that order—or the animal’s final fate—clear.