More "I am a Cat"

Yesterday I sorrowfully returned "I am a Cat" to the interlibrary loan department of DeKalb Public Library. The library we borrowed it from, Lamar University Library (???) has a "no-renewal" policy. I was about halfway through with the book, and I was beginning to appreciate some of its subtleties.

For one, I underestimated the complexity of the characters. I originally assumed the master to be an antagonistic force, representative of every thing that was wrong with humans, but it turns out that he may actually be one of the good guys in the story. It's still, as of the last time reading, ambiguous whether the cat likes or dislikes or his master. I think that, despite all his criticisms of the master, he still has some reserve of respect for him.

The latest plot development is that the cat has been snooping around in the yard of Goldfield, a wealthy businessman. Goldfield an his wife, called Madame Conk for her large nose, are intent on betrothing their daughter to Coldmoon, the former pupil of the master. Where I left off, Suzuki, a sycophantic businessman indebted to Goldfield for something or another, was visiting the Master (whose name is Sneaze, strangely enough) in an attempt to get him to urge Coldmoon to write his thesis and thus achieve the status of doctor. Suzuki was doing a good job of persuading him when who should come along but Waverhouse. Waverhouse is another hilarious character. An eternal critic, he claims to have dedicated his life to the study of aesthetics but has never produced paper nor poem on the topic. Once, he and Sneaze made a bet that if Waverhouse produced a paper on aesthetics, Sneaze would treat him to a fancy French dinner. Waverhouse never even started, but he refused to pay for the meal, saying that his intentions to produce the paper had never once flickered, he had just never gotten around to actually doing it. He isn't dumb, just lazy, or impotent.

Undoubtedly, Waverhouse, acting in his usual manner, ruined Suzuki's tactful entreatments, and the two had a good time mocking Madame Conk's eponymous organ, all to the consternation of Suzuki. This is as far as I read.

Anyhow, these characters are not the one-dimensional, hapless pseudo-academics I once took them for. As it turns out, there's a little more subtlety involved. Earlier, I commented on the un-Japanese-ness of the novel. I would like, partially, partially retract that statement. It's true that many of the physical details seem Westernized. Dialogue and names are two of the big ones. This may be due to the translation. Who knows. However, I would still regard the subject matter and plot as Eastern in nature. Similar to Tale of Genji, there is no plot. It's the unremarkable story of a cat's life. And life doesn't always play out like an action movie. This is a trait of Japanese literature. Also, the non-duality of the characters is Eastern in nature. Thus far, there are no purely good or bad characters. Rather – and again, this is like real life – the characters are a complex of emotions. I don't believe the author went out of his way to make this so, either. Rather, I believe that the Japanese take a different approach to literature, and when, writing characters, they make these characters seem realistic, and not symbolic for anything greater. Unfortunately, the book is out of my hands now. I may request it again, but I'm a little sore after that whole ordeal, which cost me a total of $5.60, and I only kept the book (which is a 600-pager) for two weeks!