Hiro Arikawa - The Travelling Cat Chronicles

He’d told her he would find someone to take Nana before he moved out of his place in Tokyo, but that hadn’t worked out, so here he was, cat in tow. Noriko had moved out of the apartment she was in, which forbade pets, and had found a new place that allowed them.

This new apartment was also in a good location, convenient for Satoru’s visits to the hospital.

‘Ah, I see you found something nice, Nana.’

Satoru narrowed his eyes as he looked at the cat. Noriko looked over, too, and saw that the cat was sniffing around one of the cardboard boxes that had yet to be flattened.

‘Why does he like that box, I wonder?’ To Noriko, it was just a cardboard box.

‘Cats like empty boxes and paper bags. And narrow spaces, too.’

Satoru squatted down next to the cat, and Noriko noticed how thin his neck was, like an old man’s, far too small for the collar of his shirt.

And he’s still so young.

Noriko felt a sharp pain deep in her nose and hurried off to the kitchen.

As she was more than twenty-five years older than Satoru, she felt it would have made more sense if she’d gone first.

‘I’m really sorry, Aunt Noriko.’

She recalled the day of that desperate phone call. A test had revealed a malignant tumour. He needed an operation immediately.

She’d travelled to Tokyo first thing. The doctor wasn’t optimistic, and with each word he spoke, it felt as if all hope was fading.

Best to operate right away, she was told, and though they did, the operation turned out to be ineffective. Tumours had spread throughout his body and all they could do was close up the areas they’d cut open.

One year left to live.

After the surgery, Satoru had lain in the hospital ward, smiling with embarrassment.

‘I’m sorry, Aunt Noriko.’

There he goes again.

She half told him off for apologizing. Satoru said he was sorry again, and was about to apologize for saying sorry, but swallowed back the words.

Satoru decided to leave his job, move from Tokyo and live with Noriko. When he finally had to be hospitalized, Noriko would go to the hospital to look after him.

Noriko worked as a judge in Sapporo but had stepped down from her job in order to be with Satoru. Judges are constantly being transferred and, if she hadn’t stepped down, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t be transferred just as Satoru was breathing his last. Taking advantage of her connections, she found a job as a lawyer in a law firm in Sapporo.

Satoru worried about Noriko having to change jobs, but she had been thinking all along of working as a lawyer after the mandatory retirement age for a judge. This just speeded things up a bit.

In fact, she regretted not having thought about changing jobs long ago, when she had first started looking after Satoru.

If she was able to leave her position as a judge now, she could have done so back then. Back when Satoru was at an impressionable age, she’d forced him to transfer to a new school repeatedly, yanking him away from friends and places he’d grown comfortable in.

If he’s going to leave this world at such a young age, she thought, the least I could have done was to give him a happier childhood.

Holding back the tears, she pretended to be straightening things up in the kitchen. Just then, Satoru called out to her from the other room.

‘Aunt Noriko, is it okay if we leave one small cardboard box and don’t flatten it? Nana really seems to like it.’

‘When he gets tired of it, be sure to put it away.’

She said this intentionally loudly so he wouldn’t notice the tears in her voice.

‘Did you find the parking spot okay?’ she went on.

She’d rented one space in the basement parking area for Satoru to park his van.

‘I did. Number seven, on the corner. Did you pick number seven especially for me?’

Satoru seemed so pleased it was the same number as his cat’s name.

‘Not really. I thought the corner spot would be easy to find, that’s all.’

Then she went ahead and asked a silly question.

‘So Nana’s name comes from nana – seven?’

‘That’s right. His tail is hooked like the number seven.’

Satoru went to pick Nana up and show him to his aunt, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. ‘Nana?’ he called, puzzled.

‘EEEEEK!’ This shriek emanated from Noriko. Something soft was rubbing against her calf.

She dropped the pan she was holding and it clattered loudly to the floor. She shrieked again as something small and furry scampered away.

Satoru scooped up the cat and burst out laughing. It seemed Noriko’s shriek wasn’t totally unexpected.

He spluttered painfully, he was laughing so much.

‘You don’t much like cats, but now you’ve got one in your own home.’

‘It’s not that I dislike them, I just don’t know how to handle them,’ she protested. Once, when she was little, she’d gone to stroke a stray cat and had been badly bitten. Her right hand – the one she had thoughtlessly touched the cat with – had swelled up to twice its usual size, and ever since then cats had been on her list of things she couldn’t handle.

A sudden thought occurred to her. At what point had Satoru found out about her aversion to cats?

‘But please understand that it wasn’t because of my issues with cats that I didn’t let you keep that cat all that time ago.’

‘I know. I understand.’

When she’d taken Satoru in, they had to give up the cat because her job meant she was transferred so often. Most of the housing they lived in was provided by the government and didn’t allow pets.

But if she had liked cats, would she have kept it? If she herself had been fond of animals – not just cats – would she have better understood the feelings of a child who had to be separated from his beloved pet?

When Satoru was on a junior-high-school trip to Fukuoka, he’d snuck out of the hotel one night. The teachers had caught him at the station, he was given a strict reprimand and his guardian was contacted, and when this happened Noriko had been shocked.

Had he been trying to visit the cat he’d had to give away? The distant relatives who had taken in the cat lived in Kokura, one stop away from Hakata on the Shinkansen train. Once Satoru had meekly mentioned wanting to see the cat, but she’d told him it was out of the question since she was too busy. As far as Noriko was concerned, the matter of the cat was settled. Now that they had someone they could trust to care for it, there was no need to travel so far just to see it.

Noriko felt a sudden rush of regret.

‘I’m really sorry I didn’t understand back then how much you loved that cat, Satoru. I should have taken the cat in like this for you when you were a child.’

‘Hachi was well taken care of until the very end, and that’s good enough. Because you found decent people to take care of him.’

Satoru stroked Nana, who was curled up on his lap, gently stroking each paw with the tips of his fingers and circling the central spot on his head.

‘But Nana scuppered all the relationships at every home I was trying to make for him. You’ve really helped us by letting me bring him with me now.’

Satoru held Nana’s head in two gentle hands and pointed his face towards Noriko.

‘Nana, you get on nicely with Aunt Noriko now, okay?’

YOU CAN TELL me to get on with her, but I’m still feeling a bit cross.

The reason is, Noriko is kind of rude. I’m going to live here with Satoru, and I just thought we should get on, so all I did was go ahead and say hello.

Rubbing yourself against someone’s legs is the best a cat can do when it comes to a warm greeting, so what was with the big squeal, that ‘EEEEEK!’? It gave me the fright of my life! Sounded like she’d run into a ghost on a dark night.