Hiro Arikawa - The Travelling Cat Chronicles

Yoshimine’s grandmother gave him a lift to the airport in her little van, and he flew back to Tokyo.

Nobody was there to meet him at Haneda airport.

He boarded the airport shuttle for the ride home, to a condo in a residential suburb. After a whole semester at his grandmother’s, the apartment seemed even smaller and more cramped than before.

His parents were as preoccupied as ever.

About three days after Yoshimine had arrived home, both his parents, surprisingly, came home from work early. His mother cooked them dinner, a rare thing, and the three of them sat down together to eat.

After dinner, his mother made them tea. The whole thing had Yoshimine confused.

His father, seated opposite him at the dining table, spoke first, a serious look on his face.

‘We have something important to tell you.’

His mother came over and sat down next to his father. This couldn’t be good.

‘The thing is, Mum and I have decided to get divorced.’

Ah – just as I thought, Yoshimine said to himself.

He had known that someday it would come to this.

‘Daigo, do you want to come and live with me, or your mother?’

He looked at his parents’ expressions and was forced to confront a reality he couldn’t avoid.

His parents waited expectantly, each hoping he would choose the other.

‘I’m sorry.’ He was finally able to squeeze out the words. ‘I can’t decide right now. I want to think about it a little more.’

His parents were clearly relieved that they wouldn’t have to deal with the problem straight away.

‘Can I go back to Grandma’s place tomorrow?’

Confronted with the fact that neither parent wanted him, he no longer had any idea how he was supposed to behave.

Naturally, they didn’t stop him, and he flew back the following day. The airline took good care of unaccompanied children, and he was actually grateful that his parents weren’t there to see him off.

His grandmother came to pick him up at the airport and drove him briskly back home in her small van.

‘Mum and Dad said they’re getting divorced.’

‘Is that right?’ his grandmother replied.

‘I don’t know which one I should live with.’

‘Well, it doesn’t really matter, because you can live with me.’

Yoshimine felt a huge lump in his throat.

‘You have a good friend here, too, Daigo, so it’s all okay.’ You have a good friend here. It’s all okay , his grandmother murmured, over and over, as if reassuring herself.

His grandmother had known what was going to happen from the moment her grandson had first come to live with her.

The lump in Yoshimine’s throat grew bigger and by the time they arrived home, it had started to hurt.

‘I’m going to run over to school.’

He changed into his uniform. Even in the holidays, they weren’t allowed at the school unless they were wearing it.

‘Why don’t you wait until a bit later? It’s the hottest time of day now.’

‘I’m worried about the greenhouse.’

Shaking off his grandmother’s objections, Yoshimine rode his bike to the junior high. As he pumped the pedals he felt the lump in his throat sink to the pit of his stomach.

Satoru’s bike was parked in the bicycle racks.

Inside the greenhouse, Yoshimine found him happily plucking tomatoes and cucumbers.

‘Hey.’

As Yoshimine stood in the doorway to the greenhouse, Satoru let out a funny-sounding ‘What the—? Weren’t you supposed to come back a little later?’

‘Yeah, stuff happened.’

They washed the vegetables in the sink, and in the shade of the school building Yoshimine told Satoru what had happened. Out of the corner of his eye, Yoshimine watched the baseball team doing fielding practice in the shimmering heatwaves radiating from the schoolyard.

‘When they left me with Grandma, I didn’t think anything major was going on, since my parents had always kind of left me to my own devices. But it’s turned out to be a big deal.’

So the form teacher’s sympathy was justified, after all.

‘They were planning to get divorced all along. And they wanted me to understand that. I’m such an idiot.’

Satoru had been listening in silence, but now he broke in. ‘That’s not true,’ he countered. ‘You were just trying not to think about it.’

Yoshimine felt that lump in his throat again. Get over it , he urged himself.

Daigo never gives us any trouble, and that makes things so much easier .

If I had been a bad kid who did give them a hard time, then what would have happened?

Ever since he was little, he had known his parents were both overly fond of their jobs and weren’t particularly interested in him. Which is why he tried his best to be the kind of child who wouldn’t require too much of their time and effort, the kind who wouldn’t get under their feet.

Being a kid who never gave his parents any trouble would at least stop them being in a bad mood and keep things settled on the home front. In that way, Yoshimine, who was always the one holding the fort, could breathe easy.

And the few times that the whole family was together, things did go smoothly. But maybe all he’d done was to prioritize what was easy in the short term.

There’s a proverb that says a child is the glue that keeps a husband and wife together. A child who was never any trouble might keep things peaceful from day to day, but when push came to shove, that child would finally come unstuck.

Maybe the kind of kid who needed more parental affection and made trouble would have been the glue that would have held their marriage together.

Enough .

Yoshimine shook his head hard to put a stop to the thoughts spinning around in it. There’s no use thinking about something that can’t be undone. It’ll just let this lump grow bigger. It’s already pretty big.

‘Still,’ he said aloud. ‘Parents get divorced all the time.’

He tried to say it casually, but the tail end of his words wavered.

‘You had it a lot harder than me, didn’t you, Satoru?’

‘But I never once experienced my parents acting like I was a nuisance, because they were gone.’

There was nothing Yoshimine could say to that. The lump in his throat burst at long last.

When his sobbing finally subsided, Satoru asked, ‘Want one?’ and held out in his soiled fingers a luscious red tomato.

REALLY, NOW , I thought, looking at Satoru.

I was out of the basket. Not sure why, but Satoru had left the door open, telling me to come out whenever I felt comfortable, but the thought of that tabby kitten with the stupid name, Chatran, invading my space was unbearable, truth be told.

Hey, tabby. You know your owner was abandoned by his parents, too. But the tabby was so engrossed in playing with his toy mouse he didn’t hear me. When are you going to realize how pointless it is to play with a fake mouse, eh?

Having a decent conversation with an itty-bitty kitten this young was out of the question. He was of the age when he’d eat, leap around a bit, then suddenly flop down asleep in the middle of whatever he was doing, as if his batteries had run down.

Even when he was in the middle of saying something, if a breeze made the curtain flutter he would drop everything and leap at it. Was I that silly when I was his age? I think I had a bit more sense than that. Well, cats mature emotionally at different rates. I felt sorry for the poor kid, compared to a rare, wise cat such as myself.

Stitching together his fragmented history, I gathered that this orange tabby was the runt of the litter, and when his mother had moved home, he hadn’t been able to keep up and got left behind.