Hiro Arikawa - The Travelling Cat Chronicles

This point about killing prey is a major divide between various animals. Horses are certainly dozens of times bigger than me, but they don’t scare me.

A sense of pride suddenly swelled up in me. Pride in myself as a cat who still hadn’t lost his identity as a hunter.

And for me, as a hunter, I can tell you that I’m not going to back away from what lies ahead for Satoru.

The horses stared at us for a while, then concluded perhaps that we weren’t an immediate threat and returned to chomping on the grass.

‘They’re a bit far away, but I wonder if I could get a photo of them with my mobile phone.’

Satoru took his phone out of his pocket. Most of the photos he took with it, by the bye, were of me.

But I don’t think you should take one of those horses, I thought.

When Satoru held the camera out towards them, the horses’ heads popped up again. And their ears shot up, too.

They stood there, stock-still, gazing at us until Satoru had taken the photo.

‘Yeah, they’re definitely too far away.’

He gave up and put the phone away. The horses continued to stare silently.

They gazed at us right up to the moment we were back in the van and the doors were shut, before finally swinging lazily back to their meal. Apologies, my friends. Sorry to bother you, I called out.

I suppose there are animals who live like this, even though they could easily kick me, and Satoru, from here to the far end of Hokkaido.

If it is their instinct that makes them that way, then I’m glad I’m a cat and have the instinct to put up a fight. I’m happy to be a high-spirited, adventurous cat that will never be intimidated by other animals, even if they’re bigger than me.

I’ve made my point, but just to reconfirm this: meeting those horses meant a lot to me.

On the drive, I saw even more lovely scenery for the first time.

White birches with pale trunks, mountain ash with red clusters of berries like bells.

Satoru told me what everything was called. And that the mountain-ash berries are bright red. I remember some expert on TV saying once, ‘Cats have a hard time distinguishing the colour red.’

‘Wow! Would you look at how red those berries are!’ Satoru called out, and that’s how I learned about the colour red . It no doubt appeared differently to Satoru, but I learned how what Satoru called red appeared to me.

‘The ones over there aren’t so red yet.’

Every time he saw trees through the window, Satoru would talk to me about them. So I became quite skilled at discriminating between different shades of red. I just learned to distinguish, in my own way of seeing things, the variations of red that Satoru pointed out, but also that they did all indeed share the same colour. For the rest of my life, I would remember all the shades of red Satoru mentioned that day.

We saw fields, too, of potatoes and pumpkins being harvested, and fields where the harvest was over.

The harvested potatoes were stuffed into bags so huge they looked like they could hold several people, and the bags were then piled up in a corner of the field. Large pyramids of pumpkins were stacked up on top of the black, damp soil.

And here and there on the gentle hills were gigantic black or white plastic bundles. I was wondering why someone had left these toys behind, but they turned out to hold cut grass.

‘They have a lot of snow in the winter here, so before it falls they have to harvest the grass so their cows and horses will have enough to eat.’

Snow – I’ve seen some of that white stuff falling in Tokyo. It melted pretty swiftly, though, so it was nothing to get worked up about. That’s what I was thinking at the time. But once winter arrived, I began to realize, the snow here would be a whole other story. Whenever there was a snowstorm and you couldn’t see anything in front of you, even I, strong as I am, would be tossed mercilessly into the air. But that’s a tale for another time.

Countryside snow that piles up to the eaves, versus city snow that melts away in a few days. It made me wonder, honestly, how they could both go by the same name.

As we drove on, taking the occasional break at a small supermarket, the scenery became more mountainous. Finally, the sun began to set.

We crossed a mountain pass as it did so, and another town came into view. As the silver van drove on, the sky fell darker by the moment, as if playing tag with the night.

‘It’s too late today. And we can’t buy any flowers,’ murmured Satoru, sounding put out, though still he didn’t head straight for our hotel but turned off the main road.

We continued down a minor road until we reached the end of the town, where we climbed a gentle hill. At the top was a wrought-iron gate. We drove straight through it.

The land here stretched out in all directions. It was neatly partitioned into squares, and in each square was a line of square stones. I knew what they were because I’d seen them on TV.

They were graves.

Apparently, humans like to have large stones put on top of them when they are dead. I remember thinking, as I watched a programme on TV about it, that it was a strange custom. The people on the programme were discussing how expensive graves were, and so on.

When an animal’s life is over, it rests where it falls, and it often seems to me that humans are such worriers, to think of preparing a place for people to sleep when they are dead. If you have to consider what’s going to happen after you die, life becomes doubly troublesome.

Satoru drove the van through this huge area as if he knew exactly where he was heading, and at last came to a halt somewhere in the centre of it all.

We got out, and Satoru walked slowly among the graves. After a while, he came to a halt in front of a grave with a whitish stone.

‘This is my father and mother’s grave.’

It was the final spot that Satoru had been so longing to visit.

I don’t get why humans like to have a huge stone put on top of them when they kick the bucket. But I do understand why they might want to look after a splendid stone like this.

I got the sense that the long drive was becoming too much for Satoru, but still, he had made it, in his silver van, with me by his side, his cat with the number-eight markings and the crooked tail like a seven.

Cats are not so heartless that they can’t respect those sorts of emotions.

‘I wanted to pay my respects with you here, Nana.’

I know, I said, rubbing my forehead vigorously along the edge of his parents’ gravestone.

It’s a great honour to meet you. Hachi was a wonderful cat, I’m sure, but don’t you think I’m rather nice, too?

‘I’m sorry. I was in a hurry, so I’ll bring flowers tomorrow,’ Satoru said, squatting down at the grave. There were some slightly wilted flowers in a vase.

‘Ah, I see,’ Satoru murmured. ‘It was Higan recently, the time of year when people visit graves… My aunt must have come.’

Satoru tenderly stroked the wilting petals.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come here much. I should have visited you more often.’

I stepped away from the grave, to give Satoru some time alone. If I disappeared completely from sight, I knew he would become anxious, so I lingered where he could see me.

During the five years I’d lived with Satoru, he’d left home only a couple of times to visit this grave.

‘Someday, I’ll take you with me, Nana,’ he had said. ‘You look just like Hachi, and my father and mother will be so surprised.

‘Someday,’ he had promised me, ‘we’ll go on a long trip together.’ And now it was happening.

‘Nana, come here!’ Satoru called me and put me on his lap. As he stroked me gently, running his wide hand across my whole body over and over, I wondered what he was talking about so silently with his parents.