I also like how with Japanese stories, it’s never black and white. Not even black OR white. When they tell a story it is just... a story. You think people have agendas that are good or evil. But sometimes they’re just agendas. Like in real life too. It’s all about how hunger can look like evil from the wrong end of the fork. Sometimes people just are. And it’s just timing that reveals them to be good or bad in our eyes and in our lives. Barring psychopaths, perhaps.
Fiction usually makes sense. Fiction usually ties up loose ends. But Japanese fiction isn’t always, or even often, structured that way. They make sense in parts but then you move the story along and then you get to the end of it and you get asked what it was about and all you can say is: well, it’s about this person. If they ask, what about this person? Sometimes the most you can say is, well things happened to the person. It’s weird, you think to yourself, because at a point, their story had made so much sense to me but now I can’t really recall anything specific.
Just like in real life.
Memories work that way often. At one point life made so much sense. But then time flows and life moves along. After you cross a certain amount of checkpoints, that clarity starts to blur. You start to wonder: what was that epiphany? Sometimes you can recall a faint trace of that dazzling, magnificent pellucidity. But it’s not the same. You are different now and your memory is all you have; if you’re lucky, you might turn into a story. But that really is about It.
The Japanese seem to understand how this works. Their stories often start not at the beginning but more like the middle. If a backstory is important, it is added later, almost as an afterthought. You are simply immersed in the story from the first scene. And the funny part is, the story never really moves very much. The climax is often less than orgasmic. But you’re left with how the story made you feel – loss, warmth, love, pain, whatever it was about. And the story often doesn’t even end. The Story-Teller just stops telling the story.
Like a memory.
Perhaps that’s why they write such brilliant cat stories, after all. Cats have their own logic. They operate on their own schedules and their own business. The Japanese don’t fit cats to the stories. They just tell the story around the cat. So while Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman cat was amazing, it was very much an anthropomorphic cat, despite it never taking human shape. Madara/Nyanko Sensei from Natsume Yujinchou, the Mask Seller from A Whisker Away, all the cats from The Cat Returns, the black cat from Kafka By The Shore... very decidedly cats, even when some of them took on human forms at one point or the other.
The morals of a cat aren't built on the same standards as the human's. Which makes it amusing but also makes sense in a weird way.
So yes, the Japs tell the most brilliant cat stories. Although why is the fat male cat always a calico?
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