I Am a Cat
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I Am a Cat (吾輩は猫である Wagahai wa neko de aru?) is a comic novel written in 1905-1906 by the Japanese author Natsume Sōseki.
In I Am a Cat, a supercilious feline narrator describes the lives of a set of middle class Japanese. Amongst these are Mr. Sneaze[1] (literally translated from Chinno Kushami, 珍野苦沙弥, in the original Japanese) and family (the cat's owners), Sneaze's garrulous and irritating friend Waverhouse (Meitei, 迷亭), and the young scholar Avalon Coldmoon (Mizushima Kangetsu, 水島寒月) with his will-he-won't-he marriage to the businessman's spoilt daughter, Opula Goldfield (Kaneda Tomiko, 金田富子). After two years chronicling the foibles of these foolish humans and the general superiority of cats, the nameless protagonist gets drunk and drowns in a water barrel.
I Am a Cat is satire on Japanese society in the time of the Meiji Emperor. Among its major themes are the period's uneasy mix of new Western ideas and Japanese traditions, and the aping of Western customs. The novel is striking for its modernity.
The book first appeared as a set of ten installments in the literary journal Hototogisu. Sōseki had originally only intended to write the short story that forms the first chapter of I Am a Cat. He was persuaded to contribute further installments by Takahama Kyoshi, one of the editors of Hototogisu. The episodic nature in which it was written may account for the stylistic incongruities between the earlier and later chapters.
Note that the title of the novel suffers in translation. In the original, it derives much of its humor from the fact that it uses pompous, formal wording wholly inappropriate to a housecat – the idiom used is that of a member of a high-born family; a colloquial translation would read "We are a Cat", using the English royal plural form.
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[edit] Film
The novel was adapted into a film by Kon Ichikawa in 1975.
[edit] References to I Am a Cat
- Shonen Knife has a song titled "I Am A Cat".
- In episode 25 of the Azumanga Daioh anime, Chiyochichi (Chiyo's Father, the big yellow cat) says 吾輩は猫である (wagahai wa neko de aru). The exact wording of the title (and opening line) of the novel.
[edit] Notes
- ^ This is the spelling used in the translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson.
[edit] References
- Natsume Soseki (2002). I Am a Cat, trans. Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Tuttle Publishing. ISBN 0-8048-3265-X.
