Japanese Cat Stories: An Appreciation

The Japanese tell the best, most convincing cat stories. I think it is in parts because of how much they seem to know cat behaviour from observation and obvious adoration. 

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?

The Infinite Terror that is Folktales

I often find myself thinking the concept terrifying that a Creature-You-Think-Is-Your-Aunt is sucking up your sister’s brains at night and you’re asking her what the noise of slurping was and your sister is crying with pain but the Creature says it was just a mouse scuttling across the floor. Yes, that’s the exact same sound as knocking back someone’s brain.

Folktales are often unapologetically horrifying.

Sociology says that folktales are mediums of orally enforcing societal laws. Customs. Traditions. If you don’t want to be either one of the sisters in that dreadful tale, you should listen to your mother tell you which path to go. Also possibly look for family resemblances.

But I don’t know. The sisters in the above tale did follow their mother’s instructions. But the Creature just decided to waylay them anyway. Well, what else is a cannibal to do, right? I say ‘cannibal’ and it is disturbing that a cannibal should unassumingly enter the world of children’s stories but the real messed up part is that the creature does not even seem to be human. So… maybe not “technically” a cannibal if she’s not the same manner of being as the sisters. But the bigger question arises here: how do you figure that two human girls un-problematically accept a strange Creature as their aunt when clearly they are human and she – this brain-sucking creature – is not? Are non-human relatives that common?

But that is the craziness that is the world of folktales. You very un-problematically accept things that go far beyond the rules of nature: the uncomplicated manner in which a human child would think a Forest Creature and she are family relations, the easy way you welcome travel between the moon and earth via a ladder or a tall tree/bamboo, the simple manner you assume proper conversations happen between entirely different species, the forthright manner you accept that a man could be friends with a tiger…

And bear in mind: in tribal folktales, these are not anthropomorphized beings. No. They’re out and out undiluted versions of their own realities in our world. The moon is still the moon; still as far, still as distant. A shrimp is still a shrimp as a tiger is still a tiger as a goblin is still a goblin as a human is still a human. And these different species apparently coexist in this strange world that is so fluid that a human could be slave to a cat, goblins (or nymphs?) and humans regularly intermarry, the thumb of a deceased could become a bird and speak in words understandable to a human, skeletons in a grave could move at the sound of melodies…

In addition, apart from not being anthropomorphized, these beings do not even seem to conform to human moralities or sensibilities. The goblins would still operate as they do in their – I imagine – spectral world. Your little witness-to-murder thumb bird is still a thumb as it is a bird. (How does that even work?)

Not to mention that you may converse all you like with your tiger best friend but he is still a tiger and it does not matter how close you are, your tiger friend would still kill and eat your family. Or you, actually, if it comes to a fight. To be fair, you would also still eat the shrimp or the bird that you talk to. Because of course you do.

So I have to wonder what the purpose to these stories is. Metaphors are very well and fine. I enjoy good metaphors and immensely appreciate clever puns. Even Jesus taught in parables. But folktales fascinate me in ways other stories often do not. The parameters that weave fiction around reality in the construction of folktales are riveting because of how extremely fluid they are in parts and suddenly how conforming too!

I consider myself a structural-functionalist. I always think things and ideas have their places in society – good or bad – otherwise they’d be obsolete and replaced.

Folktales… big time head-scratchers!! Perhaps art? Art is as you do. Art is as special as you think. Art is an abstraction of society through an artist’s lens. As a form of art, what are folktales? A representation of society, only exaggerated for drama by the storyteller? Very possible. Or maybe more? Maybe I should rethink this again. It sounds promising.