Genki Kawamura - If Cats Disappeared from the World

“Right! That’s it!”

She wiped her eyes roughly with her sleeve, and giving me a big wave, shouted manically, “May the Force be with you!”

To which I responded, holding back the tears, “I’ll be back!”

When I got home Aloha was waiting for me sporting a big grin. He gave me a wink (of course he can’t really wink so it’s more like kind of a squint), and with that, made movies disappear.

While Aloha was busy erasing movies, I was thinking about my mother. There was an Italian movie she liked a lot. Fellini’s La Strada .

The story goes like this: Gelsomina, a naive young woman, is bought from her impoverished mother by brutish circus strongman Zampanò, who wants her for his wife and partner. She remains loyal despite the abuse she suffers at Zampanò’s hands as they travel the Italian countryside performing together. Eventually Gelsomina grows weaker and when the abuse becomes intolerable, she begins to physically waste away. Zampanò abandons her.

A few years later the traveling circus arrives in a seaside town and Zampanò hears a young woman singing a song that Gelsomina used to sing. Zampanò finds out that Gelsomina has died, but her song lives on. Listening to the young woman singing Gelsomina’s song, Zampanò realizes that he loved her. He walks to the shore and collapses in tears on the beach. Crying won’t bring her back. In the end he realizes that although he really did love her, he was incapable of treating her as if he did, when they were together.

“You only realize what the really important things are when you’ve lost them.”

That’s what my mother would say when she watched this film.

It seemed like the same thing was happening with me now. I was genuinely sad now that I’d actually lost movies. I knew I would miss them. I know it was stupid, but it was only when I realized that the movies were really gone that it hit me how much they’d helped me emotionally, and how much they’d had to do with making me who I was. But my life was more important…

The Devil picked that moment to announce in his usual cheerful manner the next item he’d make disappear.

I couldn’t think about anything anymore, so I said yes just like that.

At that point, the thought that it could happen to Cabbage had never crossed my mind.

It’s funny how one strange thing is often followed by another. Like when you lose your keys and you invariably end up losing your wallet. Or in a baseball game when your team hits one home run after another. Or how a whole series of major manga artists just happened to end up living in the same cheap apartment building (the Tokiwa-So) in the early 60s.

As for me, I end up with terminal cancer, the Devil appears, phones and movies disappear from the world, and the next thing I know the cat is talking.

“Why, are you still sleeping, sir?”

I had to be dreaming.

“By George, you will get up this instant!”

It had to be a dream.

“Come now, up with you!”

But no, it wasn’t a dream. He was actually talking. And the he who was speaking was definitely Cabbage. And for some reason he sounded so refined… It was hard to know exactly what was going on.

“A bit confused, are we?”

Aloha appeared with that big grin on his face. Today he wore a sky-blue Hawaiian shirt. Again I felt like telling him to put on some real clothes. In keeping with the flamboyant style I’d come to expect from him, the brightly colored shirt featured parakeets and huge, swirly lollipops. It was so bright it made my eyes hurt. Not exactly the easiest thing to wake up to. Aloha was getting to be a pain in the ass. I snapped.

“C’mon, man, you’re always doing this to me! Now I wake up and the cat’s not meowing, it’s talking. And like a member of the landed gentry! Seriously, what’s happening here?”

“My, aren’t we witty this morning. Well, that’s just a little something extra from me, to you.”

“Something extra?”

“That’s right. After all, there are no more phones, the movies that you were so attached to are gone, so I thought you might need a little something to cheer you up. Like someone to talk to, or a new hobby or something. So, I just thought I’d try making the cat talk. I just happen to dabble in magic—you didn’t know? After all, I am the Devil…”

“But having the cat suddenly start to talk is a bit, um, disconcerting, I guess. Can you get it to stop?”

“Oh?”

Suddenly Aloha fell silent.

“Did I say something wrong?”

Aloha remained tight-lipped.

“I hope this isn’t something that you can’t fix—like you can’t put things back to normal.”

“Well, no, that’s not it. I mean, I can put things back… or should I say, it’ll all go back to normal eventually, it’s just a question of timing. You might say… I mean, God knows! But anyway, I don’t really know. I mean, I’m not God, you know? I’m just the Devil.”

How about if I just smack your head against the wall! is what I was thinking, but I swallowed my words and burrowed deeper under the covers. A world with no movies and where cats talk was not a world I wanted to wake up in.

Then Cabbage began to walk on my face. He’d always do this to wake me up (I was never a morning person). I once heard that the origin of the Japanese word for cat, “neko,” is actually “sleeping child” (same sound, different choice of kanji characters), but I think that’s a load of rubbish. Cabbage never sleeps late—he always wakes up early and starts harassing me.

“I shall be most put out if you don’t get up soon!”

Cabbage rattled on, letting out a loud moan that sounded distinctly cat-like.

“That’s it! I can’t take this anymore.”

Reality, it seemed, would not leave me alone. I gathered what energy I had and jumped out of bed.

“Oh, and just to check, you do remember, don’t you?”

Aloha thrust his face close to mine as he spoke.

“What? What do you mean?”

“What I’m erasing today, of course!”

I had no memory at all of what that was supposed to be. What had he made disappear? What was next on the list? Looking around the room I saw no change.

“Sorry, I don’t remember. What was it?”

“Honestly, what am I going to do with you… It’s clocks, man. Clocks.”

“Clocks?”

“That’s right. Today you erased clocks.”

Ah, now I remember. I made clocks disappear.

If clocks disappeared from the world…

Would the world change? I thought about it for a while.

The first thing I thought of was my father. I could see him in my mind’s eye, hunched over, working in his shop. You see, my father ran a small clock shop.

The ground floor of the house I grew up in was my father’s shop. Whenever I went downstairs I would see my father bent over his workbench in the semi-darkness, the desk lamp shining over where he worked, repairing clocks.

I hadn’t seen my father in four years. He was probably still repairing clocks in that small shop, tucked away in a corner of that small town.

If clocks were to disappear from the world, there would be no more need for clock-repair shops. No need for that little shop, nor my father’s skills. When I thought of it that way I started to feel pretty guilty.

But had clocks really disappeared from the world? It seemed hard to believe that they could all disappear so suddenly. I looked around the room. My wristwatch was definitely gone. And the small alarm clock I had in my room was nowhere to be found. Maybe it was like when phones disappeared—maybe I’d simply stopped seeing them, but whatever had happened, practically speaking, clocks had disappeared from the world.