Abridged translation of the short story "Leaving a Cat Behind" by writer Haruki Murakami on the occasion of Father's Day 2022, English translation by Philip Gabriel in The New Yorker magazine.
Of course I have many memories of my father. Naturally, we lived together in the same small house from the time I was born until I left at eighteen. And, like most children and parents, I assumed that some of my memories of my father would be happy, others not so happy. But it turns out that the memories that remain most vivid in my mind are neither of those; they contain more ordinary events.
For example:
When we were living in Shukugawa (a part of Nishinomiya City, Hyogo Prefecture), one day we went to the beach to leave a cat behind. I don't remember why we left it behind. It wasn't a kitten, but a full-grown female cat. Our house was a single-family house with a garden and plenty of room for cats. It was probably a stray cat we picked up, and then it got pregnant, and my parents decided they couldn't take care of it anymore. I don't remember exactly. Back then, abandoning cats was normal, no one criticized it. No one thought about spaying or neutering cats. I must have been in elementary school, so it was around 1955 or so.
My father and I set out one summer afternoon to leave the cat at the beach. He rode his bicycle, and I sat on the back, holding a box containing the cat. We rode along the Shukugawa River, reached the beach at Koroen, set the box down among the trees, and returned home without looking back. The beach must have been about two kilometers from my house.
At home, we got out of the car—talking about how we felt sorry for the cat, but what else could we do?—and opened the door. The cat we’d left at the beach was sitting there, meowing friendly, its tail held up. It had gotten home before us. I couldn’t figure out how it did it. We’d been riding bikes. My father was confused too. We stood there for a moment, not knowing what to say. Gradually, his look of utter astonishment turned to admiration and finally to relief. And we adopted the cat again.
Another memory of my father
Every day, before breakfast, my father would sit for a long time in front of the Buddhist altar in the house, attentively reading the sutras, his eyes closed. To be exact, it was not an ordinary Buddhist altar, but a small, cylindrical glass cabinet with a delicately carved Bodhisattva statue inside.
Apparently, this was an important ritual for Dad, one that marked the start of the day. As far as I knew, he never missed what he called his “duty,” and no one was allowed to disturb him. It was more than just a “daily routine.”
Once, when I was a child, I asked my father who he was praying for. And he said he was praying for those who had died in the war. The Japanese soldiers and the Chinese who had been their enemies. He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t press him. I thought that if I pressed him, he might open up. But I didn’t. Something must have prevented me from continuing the subject.
When my father was a boy, he was sent to study at a temple somewhere in Nara. In his understanding, he was supposed to be adopted into a family of monks in Nara. However, after his apprenticeship, he returned home to Kyoto. The reason given was that the cold had affected his health, but the real reason was probably that he could not adapt to the new environment. After returning home, my father continued - as before - to live like a son to his grandparents. But I have the feeling that the experience did not leave him, it became a deep mental scar. I cannot point to any concrete evidence for this conclusion, but there was something about my father that made me feel that way.
I remember now the look on my father's face—first surprise, then admiration, and then relief—when the cat we left at the beach came home before us.
I have never experienced anything like it. I have to say I was raised very lovingly, as an only child in a very ordinary family. So I cannot understand, practically or emotionally, the psychological scars that parental abandonment leaves on a child. I can only vaguely imagine.
My father was born on December 1, 1917, in Awata-guchi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto. When he was a child, the peaceful democratic Taisho era was coming to an end, followed by the gloomy Great Depression, followed by the quagmire of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and finally the tragedy of World War II. Then came the chaos and poverty of the early post-war period, when my father's generation struggled to survive.
Soon after my father was discharged, World War II broke out in the Pacific. If he had not been released, if he had been deployed with his old unit, he would almost certainly have died on the battlefield, and of course, I would not be here now. You could call it luck, but surviving when all his old comrades had died became the source of endless pain and suffering for my father. Now, I understand even more why my father closed his eyes and focused on chanting every morning for the rest of his life.
My father always loved literature, and after becoming a teacher, he spent a lot of time reading. Our house was filled with books. This probably influenced me as a child, as my passion for reading grew. My mother often told me, "Your father is very smart." How smart he was, I don't know. Honestly, that's not a question that interests me much. In my field of literature, intelligence is less important than a sharp intuition. That may be so, but the truth is that my father always got excellent grades in school.
Compared to him, I was never interested in studying. My grades were lackluster from start to finish. I was the type of person who was always eager to pursue the things that interested me and did not bother about anything else. That was how I was as a student, and that is how I am now.
This frustrated my father, who, I'm sure, compared me to himself at the same age. "You were born in peacetime," he must have thought. "You can study as much as you want, there's nothing stopping you. So why can't you try harder?"
I think my father wanted me to follow the path he had been prevented from following because of the war. But I could not live up to his expectations. I could never force myself to learn the way he wanted me to. I found most of the classes at school mind-numbing, the school system too formulaic and harsh. This disappointed my father deeply, and I suffered from a deep grief (and unconscious anger). When I became a writer in my thirties, my father was pleased, but by then our relationship had soon become distant and cold.
As I grew up and developed my own personality, the discord between my father and I became more apparent. We both refused to give in, until we could no longer express our thoughts directly to each other, and we became two completely different types of people. For better or for worse.
After I got married and started working, my father and I grew more and more distant. By the time I devoted myself to writing full-time, our relationship had become so complicated that we had almost completely lost contact. We hadn’t seen each other in over twenty years, and only spoke when absolutely necessary.
My father and I were born in two different times and environments, our way of thinking and seeing the world were too different. If at some point, I had tried to mend the relationship, things could have gone in a different direction. But I was too focused on what I wanted instead of trying to do that.
My father and I finally spoke face to face, not long before he died. I was nearly sixty, my father was ninety. He was in a hospital in Nishijin, Kyoto. He was seriously ill with diabetes, and cancer was ravaging almost his entire body. He had always been a plump man, but now he was emaciated. I almost didn’t recognize him. And there, in the last days of his life—literally the last days—my father and I managed to have an awkward conversation and reach a sort of reconciliation. Despite our differences, I felt a connection, a bond as I watched my father suffer.
Even now, I can still recall the confusion between father and son that summer day, when we cycled to the beach in Koroen to leave a tabby cat behind. I can recall the sound of the waves, the scent of the wind through the pine trees. It was the accumulation of such trivial things that made me who I am today.
Anyway, there's only one thing I want to present here. One, single, obvious truth:
I am an ordinary son of an ordinary man. That much is obvious, I know. But, as I began to discover that truth, it became clear to me that everything that happened in my father’s life and mine was by chance. We live our lives in this way: taking things that happen by chance and chance as the only reality.
In other words, imagine raindrops falling on a vast expanse of land. Each of us is a nameless raindrop among countless raindrops. A single, independent drop, of course, but entirely replaceable. Yet that single raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, and the task of carrying on that history. Even as it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into something collective. Or perhaps more accurately, because it is absorbed into a larger, more encompassing entity.
