Hiro Arikawa - The Travelling Cat Chronicles

‘I really wish we could have gone the whole way in the van. I’m sorry about that,’ Satoru said.

Not to worry. It’s only for a day, so I can put up with it. Cats might not seem it, but we are nothing if not patient.

On this trip, it seems like we’ll still have a long way to travel even after the ferry has docked. And Satoru gets tired easily these days.

‘I’ll come as often as I can to check on you, so if you get lonely, just hang in there.’

Any chance you can refrain from the over-protective comments in front of the others? You’re embarrassing me.

‘Hello there. I hope you two cats will get on.’

Satoru was peering into the cage just below mine, the one with the chinchilla in it. I was in my cage, so I couldn’t see, but since the moment we arrived it had been curled up in a corner.

‘This one seems lonely, too. Maybe he’s feeling afraid, with all the dogs around today.’

No, you guessed wrong. The curled-up chinchilla’s tail had been twitching all this time, and it was obvious to me that what he was feeling was annoyance and irritation at the dogs’ incessant chatter.

‘Okay, I’ll see you later, Nana.’

His suitcase in hand, Satoru left, closing the door carefully behind him.

And the dogs immediately tried to make conversation.

So – tell me – where ya from, and where ya headed? What kind of guy is your master? In an instant, I understood exactly how the chinchilla felt, curled up there in disgust, and I copied his way of dealing with it.

I was still curled up in the back of my cage, pretending to be asleep, when the door opened wide and in stepped Satoru.

‘I’m sorry, Nana. I guess you really are lonely in here.’

After that, he came back to check on me another ten times. With Satoru popping in and out more often than the other owners, before long the dogs started teasing me about it. Every time Satoru left the room, there would be a noisy chorus of Pampered! Pampered!

Knock it off, you hounds! I growled, and was about to curl up again in the back of the cage when the chinchilla, directly below me, addressed the room.

Carrying on like a bunch of brats – you chaps are really starting to annoy me. Don’t you understand? It’s his master who’s the lonely one?

For an expensive-looking long-haired breed, this cat had quite a mouth on him. The dogs all grumbled back, Yeah, but… You see, Nana’s master said Nana was lonely, didn’t he?

For dogs, you lot have a rubbish sense of smell. That master gives off a smell that says he’s not going to be around for long. So he wants to spend as much time as possible with his darling cat.

In an instant, the dogs had piped down. It’s too bad. The poor guy , they started to mumble in hushed voices. To tell you the truth, they weren’t very subtle about it. But I forgave them. They were all young dogs, and none too bright.

Thank you for that.

I aimed this at the invisible cage below me, and the chinchilla shot back with a sullen They were getting on my nerves, that’s all .

The next time Satoru appeared, the scolded hounds all wagged their tails enthusiastically at him. ‘Wow,’ Satoru said happily, ‘you guys really are happy to see me, aren’t you?’ and he reached in through the bars of one or two of the cages to stroke the occupants. Not the sharpest pencils in the box, these dogs, but I’d have to say they were pretty docile and decent types.

After this, we cats occasionally joined in the dogs’ idle chatter, and time passed by on our unremarkable sea voyage. Most of the time, though, we talked at cross purposes. We couldn’t fathom, for instance, why the dogs were so into snacks like canine chewing gum and other stuff.

At midday the following day, the ferry arrived safely at its destination – the island of Hokkaido. Satoru came to fetch me first thing.

‘I’m sorry, Nana. You must have been lonely.’

Not at all. I had a good chat with that barbed-tongued chinchilla. I was just thinking it would be great if I could say my goodbyes to him face to face, when Satoru turned my basket around so the open door was facing the room.

‘Nana, say goodbye to everyone.’

See you all, I said, and the hounds’ tails wagged in unison.

Guddo rakku!

This from the chinchilla, in some language I didn’t understand.

Guddo … what?

It means ‘good luck’. My master often says it.

Come to think of it, the chinchilla’s master, a foreigner with a Japanese wife, had come to see him during the journey. The cat had learned human language mainly from Japanese people, but apparently understood a lot of what his master said, too.

Thanks. Guddo rakku to you, too.

We bid farewell to the pet room, made our way down to the car deck and climbed into our silver van.

When we emerged from the mouth of the ferry, we were greeted by wall-to-wall blue sky.

‘Hokkaido, at last, Nana.’

The land was flat and sprawling. Outside the window was what looked like an ordinary city, but everything seemed much more spread out. The roads, for instance, were far wider than those around Tokyo.

We drove for a while before reaching the suburbs. There wasn’t much traffic, and we enjoyed a leisurely drive, listening to upbeat music as we went.

The road was bordered with a lovely profusion of purple and yellow wildflowers.

You could just leave the roads in Hokkaido as they were and they’d look pretty gorgeous. Not at all like the roads in Tokyo, which are surrounded by endless concrete and asphalt. Even in the more built-up areas here, the hard shoulders are all dirt. Because of that, perhaps, it’s easy for the soil to breathe and the flowers to thrive. The scenery was very soothing.

‘The yellow ones are called goldenrods, but I don’t know about the purple ones.’

The flowers had caught Satoru’s eye, too. The jumble of colours was that striking. The purple wasn’t one block of colour but various gradations from light to dark.

‘What do you say we stop for a bit?’

Satoru pulled over in a layby. I got out, with Satoru carrying me. An occasional car passed by, so he held me safely in his arms and wouldn’t let me down as he climbed up to the purple flowers.

‘They might be wild chrysanthemums. I had imagined them to be a bit neater and tidier, though…’

The wildflowers pushing up vigorously from the soil had stems covered with blooms, like an upside-down broom. Not at all what you’d call graceful; more forceful and vigorous than that.

Oh!

As soon as I spotted it, I reached out my paw. A honeybee was buzzing among the flowers.

‘Careful, Nana. You might get stung.’

Hey, what are you going to do? It’s instinct. I clawed at the bee and Satoru brought my paws together in his hand and held them there.

Damn it. It’s exciting to play with the insects flying around. Let me go, I said, straightening my legs against his arms to get free, but Satoru held me tight and put me back in the van.

‘If you just caught them, that would be fine, but I know you’ll eat them, too. And we can’t have you getting stung inside your mouth.’

Well, you catch something, you’ve got to take a bite out of it. Back in Tokyo, when I killed cockroaches I’d always take a bite. The hard wings were like cellophane so I didn’t eat those, but the flesh was soft and savoury.

Every time Satoru found the remains of a cockroach I’d left, he’d scream. I don’t understand why humans have such an aversion to them. Structurally, they’re not so different from kabutomushi and drone beetles, the kind kids collect as pets. If it was one of those beetles, you can bet he wouldn’t scream like that. But from a feline point of view, their speed makes them both challenging and fun to catch.