I Am a Cat

""I am a cat. As yet I have no name""

Written by Soseki Natsume (the pen-name of Natsume Kin'nosuke), I Am a Cat first appeared in ten installments in the literary magazine Hototogisu (Cuckoo) between 1905 and 1906. Soseki had not intended to write more than a short story but it was so popular that he expanded it to fill a whole book. It is the chronicle of an unloved, unwanted, wandering cat who spends all his time observing humans, from his schoolteacher master, his servant, his horrible children, and more.


 * Humans Are Bastards: One of the first things the cat tells us of was how a Shosei (student) catches, boils and eats cats. It doesn't get much better from there when he tries to sneak into the school-teacher's house and repeatedly gets thrown out by the maid. The children spend a lot of their time torturing the poor thing.