Tobin Moffatt’s Reviews > I Am a Cat > Status Update

‘“Nobody in our poetry group is in any way associated with this Sōseki fellow, and it would be unreasonable if you gentleman were to condemn my poems by reason of some such imagined association. I took great pains with the construction of this work, and I would like in particular to draw your attention to my telling contrast of the bitter world with the sweetness of a kiss.” ‘

‘ “You had a nap? That’s good. If one could only sleep during the daytime and then still sleep at night. . . why, nothing could be more wonderful.”

‘. . . and if, like maggots wriggling in the fabric of this world, we are to keep thrashing about down here, we do need rest to do it . . . Even my master, that timid but complaining crank in the grinding mechanism of our national education, sometimes takes a weekday off. I am no cog, I am a cat, a being sensitive to the most subtle shades of thought and feeling.’

It makes me happy to know that in Japan they assign this in junior high school a la Tarjei Vessas’ The Birds in Norway, or Bruno Schulz in Poland. Bravo not-Canada places.

‘ . . . Next we may ask to what extent did human effort contribute to the creation of heaven and earth, and the answer is that it contributed nothing. What right, then, do human beings hold to decide that things not of their own creation nevertheless belong to them? . . . all land-ownership is unnatural and irrational.’

‘If whiskers establish sauciness, every cat is impudent.”

‘I had been quietly listening to the successive stories of these three precious humans, but I was neither amused nor saddened by what I’d heard. I merely concluded that human beings were good for nothing except strenuous employment of their mouths for the purpose of whiling away their time in laughter at things which are not funny, and in the enjoyment of amusements which are not amusing.’