My Cat Mii

It was the end of summer, 1977. At least I think it was late summer. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny-tiny baby kitten.

Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck inside the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y. neighborhood of Fuchū City in western Tokyo.

In which direction was the wind blowing that night? It was most likely a gentle breeze blowing up to my house from the river. I’d followed her cries as they carried on this breeze. At first, I searched the gaps in the hedge around my house and among the weeds of the empty plots on my street. But her cries were coming from high up, not low down. I looked up and suddenly saw a little white dot.

The large expanse of the school grounds was shrouded in the dim light. Before me was a high fence separating the road and the school. Somebody must have shoved the kitten into the fence. She was hanging so high up that even on tiptoe I could barely reach her as she clung on for dear life.

She had sharp, pointy ears, innocent glistening eyes, and a pink slit of a mouth, and she was puffing her body up as much as she could to stop herself from falling, looking down at me fearfully. It was obvious that she hadn’t dropped there out of nowhere or climbed up by herself, but had been put there deliberately, out of malice or mischief.

“Come with me …”

I reached out my arms and the tiny kitten clung to me with surprising strength. She was freezing cold, a helpless little thing. I hugged her to my chest and a sweet animal scent filled my nostrils. Her body was infused with the smell of milk and summer. The smooth feel of soft baby fur filled the palm of my hand.

She couldn’t have been long born, but she already had perfectly formed needle-sharp claws. Her nose and mouth and everything about her was tiny and adorable. As I stroked her, she leaned her entire body weight into me, helplessly light, and bumped her head against me a few times.

I didn’t know where her mother was, whether she had been abandoned or had strayed off and gotten lost before someone stuck her into the fence. All I knew was that she must have felt utterly desperate hanging up there, and I just wanted to give her somewhere cozy to rest, at least for the night. Did I have any milk at home? I’d have to find a box where she could feel safe … My mind full of such thoughts, I hugged her to my chest and rushed back home.

“A kitten,” I told my husband as I ran into the kitchen. “She was crying outside.” I held her up by the scruff of her neck for him to see. “Look how little she is!” My cotton shirt made a ripping sound as I peeled her away from my chest. In the light, I could see she had a pretty face. She was a calico, with white, black, and tan stripes on her head and patches on her back, and a belly that was pure white.

This was more than twenty years ago now, but I can still clearly remember that tiny kitten’s sharp claws. I’ll never forget how she innocently butted her little head against my chest either. Or the breeze that night. Those cries from the fence would never have reached me without it. Maybe it had delivered her cries to my window. Perhaps by some ghostly chance the breeze from the river had a magical power that night.

The breeze would come in waves from the river up to the houses in my neighborhood. Maybe it was the quality of the water, but to me it always seemed to have a refreshing smell of liquor, and it was so pleasant, neither too strong nor too cold, that in summer and fall I wanted to keep my windows open all the time.

Maybe it was thanks to the power of my windows that I found my cat. Three years or so after we moved to Tokyo, I abruptly stopped making yellow curtains. In the little house we’d lived in before this one, I’d been obsessed with making yellow curtains and yellow cushions.

Our first house had been on the banks of the Edo River in eastern Tokyo. It was part of a new residential development in which all the houses were two stories, all the same shape with the same layout of rooms. The land had been carved up and sold off, with houses crammed in as tightly as possible with no space at all for anything like gardens, and so close together that if you put your ear against the wall you could hear the sound of the TV or voices next door.

Within a month of moving in, I realized the house was full of dust mixed with yellow sand. The sand relentlessly got into the cracks between the tatami mats and in the rails of the sash window frames, and it turned my duster yellow in no time at all. After battling for weeks against this yellow dust brought on by the breeze from goodness knows where, I finally decided to furnish the house with rugs made from yellow and orange fabrics, yellow curtains, and lemon-colored cushions. If I covered everything in the same color, the dust wouldn’t be so visible anymore. As a result, our house was filled to the rafters with bright colors, and just stepping inside felt like encountering a meadow of poppies. Yet even such desperate measures didn’t solve the problem of the yellow sand.

I was cured of this yellow sickness only when we moved out west to Fuchū. We were still living near a river there, but the breeze was completely different.

We had come to this house on the banks of the Tama River in the spring of 1975. It belonged to my husband’s colleague A., who had been transferred by their company to another part of the country and had rented it to us so we could keep an eye on it. It was a comfortable house with a child’s swing in the garden. It had a spacious south-facing living room and a bright kitchen with a counter, in addition to two Japanese-style rooms and a small storeroom.

All the rooms had windows with a good view outside. There was plenty of space between ours and the surrounding houses, and you couldn’t hear any noise through the walls.

Houses are strange. Inside they have voices, a sense of presence. Rooms can have their own smell, but also an atmosphere that is warm and tender. Maybe the heart of the person who built a house permeates its every corner. Even though this house in Fuchū belonged to someone else, unlike our previous place, it always had a pleasant feel.

I stopped buying yellow fabrics. White suited our new home. The curtains were white, and the house looked prettiest with minimal furnishings. I didn’t place any rugs on the floor. The sensation of bare feet on the wooden floors became the essence of home.

I grew accustomed to the sight of the swing swaying in the breeze and to the soft, warm touch of the grass in the garden. Even though the sofa and most of the tableware and other contents of the kitchen cupboards belonged to someone else, after six months I already felt as though we’d been living there for years. I loved strolling along the river embankment at dusk on my days off, gazing at the surface of the water.

In early spring dogwood bloomed white and pink outside the houses, and wooded areas here and there were full of the white flowers of robinia trees. We’d moved into this house in spring but, before we knew it, it was already autumn and the landscape was changing rapidly.

I only realized that the trees in front of our house were robinias when the white flowers came into bloom. When I opened the windows, the curtains puffed up in the breeze, carrying their heavy fragrance. The blossoms made the whole neighborhood feel cheerful. I had never lived anywhere with such a fragrant breeze before.

My days were now so peaceful I could scarcely believe I had once been possessed by the yellow sickness.

It was at this point that I met my cat. She would never have been able to sneak into my unburdened heart the way she did had this place not been colorless and transparent. I was giddily happy, no longer irritated by sand or continually running around with a duster. Maybe it was because my defenses were down that I readily welcomed her into my life after our eyes met, our skin came into contact, and I set off walking without a second thought.

Kitten             tiny
Claws            see-through          like egg white
Ears               moving                 listening
Eyes              moist                     limpid
The faint smell of liquor in the neighborhood
               night
You’ve come from far away
Welcome                           hello
Me human                        you cat

***

It took us days to come up with a name for her. Naming an animal is hard, really hard. I would come up with names like Ringo, Umi, Muru, and Tama but end up crying, “Oh, I just don’t know!” However hard I thought, I just couldn’t find a name that suited this little kitten. My husband said flippantly that it didn’t matter if she didn’t have a name, but it was so inconvenient for her not to. How was I supposed to call her without a name? And it occurred to me that the only real difference between stray cats and pet cats was whether or not they had one.

Meanwhile, we were calling her “she” or “the little one.” Then, one day, we started calling her Mimi. The kitten cried an astonishing amount, whenever she wanted milk or played with the curtains or struggled while we were removing fleas. Her high-pitched mii-mii sounded somehow sad, as though she was calling for her mother, and made my chest constrict. This mii-mii got shortened to Mimi, but the name didn’t last long. It proved somewhat tricky to say Mimi out loud, and my tongue stumbled over it every time.

After a few days, then, Mimi got shortened even further to just Mii.

Later, I would sigh over the fancy names people gave their cats: Randy, Jajamaru, Sasuke, Marilyn, and so on. All of my friends’ cats, and the numerous cats in the books I browsed at the bookshop or came across in novels or newspaper columns—all of them had names with an appropriately cute ring to them.

My cat was called simply Mii. We sometimes nicknamed her Mii-tan, but her formal name was Mii Inaba. I simply couldn’t manage to come up with a better name for her, however hard I tried. Her mew-mii, mew-mii way of crying that I’d first heard when she was hanging there in the dark had somehow stuck in my heart and wouldn’t go away.

And thereafter, whenever I called her name, she would naturally answer me, mii. Mii had decided on her own name with the sound of her cries.

Nobody knows               your real name
From a dark corner in our new neighborhood
You were a voice that came raining down
Like stars                         like gems
Like little grains of light                        knock-knocking on
        the door
Music was playing in the distance     maybe Yesterday
Your yesterday                   singing
Telling of the past saying goodbye to today
              singing in the distance
I wanted to believe it
Like a freshly laid egg                       a brand-new you
Maybe I should have called you Tomorrow
Or maybe Dawn

Where do names come from?
You answer simply, mii

From Mornings without Mii, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori and to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next month.

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