Oh Tama! Read online

  Oh, Tama!

  A MEJIRO NOVEL

  Mieko Kanai

  translated from the Japanese by

  Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy

  Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California

  Published by

  Stone Bridge Press

  P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

  TEL 510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com

  Except on the cover, title page, and this copyright page, Japanese names in this work are given according to Japanese convention, family name first.

  © 1987 Mieko Kanai.

  Translation © 2014 Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy.

  First published in 2014 by Kurodahan Press, Fukuoka, Japan.

  First Stone Bridge Press edition published in 2019.

  Quotation from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot used with permission of the author’s estate and Faber & Faber Limited, London, England.

  Cover illustration by Kumiko Kanai.

  Cover design by Linda Ronan, incorporating Bigstock photograph © Shawn.ccf.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019

  P-ISBN 978-1-61172-051-8

  E-ISBN 978-1-61172-936-8

  Contents

  Introduction

  ONEOh, Tama!

  TWOThe Gift

  THREEAmanda Anderson’s Photographs

  FOURWandering Soul

  FIVEEvanescence

  SIXBalls of Confetti

  On Oh, Tama!—In Lieu of an Afterword

  Afterword to the Paperback Edition (1999)

  Contributors

  Introduction

  Tama ya (Oh, Tama!) by Kanai Mieko is a late-twentieth-century masterpiece of cat literature.

  Since ancient times cats have fascinated people and inspired artists and writers. There are celebrated feline protagonists and unforgettable cameo appearances of various cats in poetry, drama, fiction, art, film, manga, anime, and many other genres. There is a Wikipedia entry, a “List of cats in literature,” and numerous cat-related blogs, anthologies, and studies.1 With a few exceptions, such as Léonard Foujita and Murakami Haruki, cats in the works of Japanese writers and artists are not widely known outside Japan. However, there is indeed a long and interesting genealogy of literary cats in Japan from the celebrated example of a little Chinese cat that appears in the “Wakana” (New Herbs, or Spring Shoots) chapters (34 and 35) of The Tale of Genji. Murasaki Shikibu gives crucial roles to this cat, first as an accidental aid to the young Kashiwagi’s obsessive longing for the Third Princess, the young wife of the middle-aged Genji, then as a consolation or substitute for that forbidden love, and finally as a symbolic premonition of the Third Princess’s pregnancy with Kashiwagi’s child.

  Of the countless cats that appear in modern Japanese literature, arguably the three most famous are the nameless first-person narrator-protagonist of Natsume Sōseki’s Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat, 1905), Lily in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Neko to Shōzō to futari no onna (A Cat, a Man, and Two Women, 1936), and Nora in Uchida Hyakken’s essay-like autobiographical narrative Nora ya (Oh, Nora!, 1957). While Sōseki’s nameless “wagahai” is male, Lily is a female tortoiseshell that is the object of infatuation and undivided devotion on the part of the male human protagonist, Shōzō. Nora, on the other hand, is not a female but a male cat. He is so named because he was a stray cat, nora neko. However, like the heroine of Ibsen’s famous play, which has had a great impact upon modern Japanese literature since the early twentieth century, this male cat Nora leaves home. Hence the distraught narrator-protagonist keeps searching for the beloved cat, desperately calling out, “Oh, Nora, Nora, where are you?”

  The title of Kanai’s novel is a take-off on Hyakken’s title. As a cat’s name, “Tama” (literally, jewel or a ball) is much more traditional and common than “Nora” or “Lily.” As Kanai mentions in her “Afterword,” which is also translated in this volume, almost each chapter of the original Japanese text playfully embeds “Tama” in the chapter title, while at the same time “borrowing” someone else’s title. The reader will also notice that a cat called Lily makes a brief appearance in this novel; but unlike Tanizaki’s coquettish female cat, this one is a male—reminding us also of Hyakken’s male Nora—and suffers from diarrhea—an illness that recalls the ending of another work of Tanizaki, Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters). Kanai also makes references and allusions to other works of cat literature and their authors, such as Miyazawa Kenji and Ishii Momoko—in most cases with an ironic twist, but also with affection.

  Given the breadth of her literary interests and knowledge, it is almost certainly the case that Kanai Mieko is familiar with most of the canonical cat literature, ranging from Poe and Baudelaire to Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907), T. S. Eliot’s book of light verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), and perhaps the most celebrated example of cat fiction in the twentieth century, La Chatte (1933), by the French writer Colette. This novel describes a strange love-triangle involving the charming but immature Alain, his loving but too possessive new wife, Camille, and the cat, Saha. Alain has loved Saha since his boyhood, and, forced to choose between his wife and the beloved feline, upon whose life an attempt has been made by her human rival, decisively prefers his cat.

  Oh, Tama! celebrates the genealogy of cat (and other) literature, and simultaneously teases out and subverts some unconscious biases and neglected issues, especially those concerning gender and sexuality, in the canonical texts. Unlike Sōseki’s nameless cat, who was abandoned as a kitten, Tama has a name; and she is brought to the narrator, Natsuyuki, not as a kitten but as a heavily pregnant cat at the beginning of the novel. The themes of pregnancy and motherhood are important in the narrative. However, the mothers and the mothers-to-be in this novel, feline or human, are completely different not only from the discourse of ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother) but also from the tropes of the eternal mother or the evil mother. Natsuyuki’s nonchalant mother, for example, has almost completely forgotten about her older son, Fuyuhiko, from her first marriage. The mother of Eurasian “Alexandre” does not seem to know or care who fathered him. And Alexandre’s sister Tsuneko, whose name embeds the Japanese word for a cat, neko, regularly uses her self-proclaimed “pregnancy” as a convenient source of income.

  Tama ya was originally published as a series of stories, mostly in the literary magazine Gunzō (Group), between 1986 and 1987, and then as a hard cover in 1987 and a paperback in 1991, with a second paperback edition in 1999. For this work Kanai Mieko received the 27th Women’s Literature Prize. Tama ya is the second book in a series of Kanai’s novels that was earlier called the Mejiro Tetralogy, but with the addition of new works is now called the Mejiro Series, named after the area of Tokyo between the mega-towns of Shinjuku and Ikebukuro. The main characters (and also the author Kanai and her artist sister Kanai Kumiko, whose artwork is featured on the cover of the current volume as well as in numerous other books of Mieko) live in this area. Most of the main characters in one book appear as side characters in the others. Natsuyuki and Alexandre, for example, appear in the third work in the series, Indian Summer (1988), whose protagonists, Momoko, Hanako and Momoko’s writer-aunt, had earlier appeared in Oh, Tama!

  These Mejiro texts are full of humor and irony. While earlier works of Kanai, published since 1967, are noted for their surrealistic, sensuous, and poetic style and arresting, at times violent themes, the Mejiro novels focus on the human comedy in the seemingly mundane, actual world. The protagonists of the series are, however, in one way or another engaged in creative or intellec
tual activities, even though they are often unemployed or at loose ends. In Oh, Tama! Natsuyuki is an unemployed photographer and Alexandre an under-employed pornographic film star, whereas Fuyuhiko is a “fifth-grade psychiatrist” temporarily on “love sick-leave,” so to speak. Intermingled with comic misadventures and layers of ambiguity created through the interactions of these characters are amusing conversations and musings about film, literature, and photography.

  Kanai is a prolific and acclaimed writer not only of fiction but also of literary, film, and art criticism, with essays and commentaries on topics ranging from food, football (soccer), and fashion to philosophy, and, of course, felines. The second volume of the Kanai Mieko Essay Collection (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2013) features “Cats and Other Animals.” While a few of her short stories, poems, and excerpts from her longer works were translated into English beginning in the late 1970s, and attracted some attention among feminist literary scholars, this is only the third book-length English translation of her work.2 We are certain that the reader will enjoy Oh, Tama! on multiple levels—as an easy, entertaining novel about a group of sometimes eccentric yet sometimes very ordinary people; as a treasure chest of rich and varied parody, allusion and intertextuality; as a text full of popular cultural icons from the 1970s and 1980s; and as a delightful example of what we may call “kiterature.”

  Tomoko Aoyama

  Paul McCarthy

  NOTES

  1Some of the studies include: Katharine M. Rogers, The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998); Kawai Hayao, Neko damashii (The [trickster-]cat spirit, Shinchōsha, 2000); and the feature on “Neko no bungaku hakubutsu shi” (Historia Naturalis of Cat Literature) in Kokubungaku, vol. 27, no. 12 (September 1982), pp.6–133. See also Ochanomizu Bungaku Kenkyūkai, Bungaku no naka no “neko” no hanashi (Cats in literature, Shūeisha, 1995) and Yuriika (Eureka), vol. 42, no.13 (November 2010) that also features “The Cat: One of the Most Familiar and Appealing yet Enigmatic and Mysterious of All Friends.”

  2The first translated volume is Mieko Kanai, The Word Book, translated by Paul McCarthy (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive, 2009). The second book in translation is Indian Summer, trans. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2012). For information on shorter translations, see Aoyama’s “Introduction” in Indian Summer.

  ONE

  Oh, Tama!

  Carrying a big, round-faced cat in a leather rucksack on his back, Alexandre turned up on his 250 cc motorcycle.

  To keep the terrified cat from jumping out in panic, he had tied the bag’s leather drawstrings so that only the cat’s face protruded. Put in the oblong rucksack, the cat was forced to stand on its hind legs, a very uncomfortable posture for a four-legged creature. So as soon as the bag was put on the floor and the drawstring loosened, the black-and-white cat rushed out, keeping close to the ground, and ran into the space between the writing desk and the chair. Then, sitting with her front paws placed neatly together, she turned a steady but fearful gaze on me.

  “What’s with this cat?” I asked, surprised. Alexandre, mishearing, and thinking I had asked the cat’s name, replied, “It’s Tama—Tama-chan.” Then, addressing her he said, “Isn’t that right, Tama? Tama, Tama. Oh, Tama! Sweet little Tama! Now don’t you worry about a thing. This nice guy here’s gonna look after you, yes he is. So calm down now, calm down, okay?”

  Then, talking to me again in a slightly menacing tone, “You are a nice guy, so you’ll take her in, won’t you? You’d never do something cruel like dumping a pregnant pet cat, now would you?” It sounded like a threat.

  “Or are you going to say no, ’cause it wasn’t you who let her get pregnant?”

  He was certainly insinuating something. It occurred to me that, with this heavily pregnant cat thrust into his rucksack, Alexandre was in fact searching for the father of Tsuneko’s soon-to-be-born child. “Look, Alexandre,” I said, “to be honest, I don’t think I’m qualified to be a father.”

  “Don’t worry. I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That you’re not the father of my sister’s kid,” he said just like that, which relieved me but at the same time left me with mixed, ambiguous feelings.

  So I said, “Why’s that?” If he’d said, “It’s your kid,” I would have protested, emphasizing that I’d always been careful. But still it’s true that we did have sex a few times—to be precise, the first time in my apartment, and the next time when I stayed overnight in her apartment, but I used—though of course I wouldn’t buy those jumbo-sized packs at the Peacock Supermarket—you know, those ones that look like pretty boxes of chocolates and sit in a big basket between the sanitary napkins and the detergent shelves—those large, economy-sized boxes designed to help married couples with their family planning needs. (Yuck! They’re “home products” just like cabbage, flour, miso, fish, meat, and cockroach killer.) No, but I did use one of the condoms I kept in the inside pocket of my jacket.

  Though that morning, when we made love for the second time, still half asleep, I’m not sure if I used one. Why should I be? I know it’s no use saying this now, but naturally you don’t have sex for the sake of contraception. You use contraception because you need it to get sex. Besides, sexual desire (actually, all desire) is impulsive and as gooey as the inside of your mouth when you’ve got pyorrhea. So contraception doesn’t always work, I thought, as I watched the cat crawl slowly out from under the desk, still keeping as close to the floor as possible and sniffing nervously around the strange room.

  I said again, “Know what?”

  “Oh, it really doesn’t matter who, does it, Tama-chan?” said Alexandre. “I’m not interested in who the father is. Are you? Does that interest you?”

  “Well, . . .”

  As I hesitated, he went on. “Some people even worry about who fathered her kittens,” indicating the cat with his chin. “They’ll try to guess from the colors and the patterns of their coats whether it’s the orange-striped tom or the gray-and-black tabby that hangs around the neighborhood,” he laughed.

  “That reminds me—as you can see, me and Sis have different dads, and we’ve never met either of ’em. We don’t care. I’m not looking for her kid’s dad, though I do want to ask your advice about that later. But anyhow, for now, I just want you to look after Tama. When we found out she was gonna have kittens, we decided we couldn’t keep her. You know, they say—I don’t know much about these things, but they say this kind of furry animal is full of parasites—like, blah-blah-distoma, or something, isn’t it? Anyway, they’re no good for pregnant women. The baby might be deformed.

  “That’s what my aunt says, so I say to her ‘Why don’t you look after Tama for us then, Auntie? She’s pregnant too, but those blah-blah parasites don’t harm the cat itself, do they?’ ‘No, they don’t,’ she says. So then Sis says, ‘Please look after Tama, Auntie,’ but then she says, ‘Me? Oh, no way! I was born in the year of the tiger, so I can’t get along with cats. They say kittens don’t do well with tiger-year people around. That’d be terrible for Tama. No, no, it’d never work. Here’s a better idea, Kanemitchan. (My real name’s Kanemitsu, you know.) You always wanted to have a pet cat, so why don’t you look after her? That’d really be the best. And in return, I’ll look after Tsuneko-chan’s baby while she goes off to work.’ And that’s how I ended up with Tama.

  “What’s that, Tama? You’re hungry? Hey, Natsuyuki, can you open this can here? She’s eating for several now, and she sure does eat a lot,” said Alexandre, stroking the head of the cat, who had snuggled up to him, her long black tail up and swaying, rubbing her head against his legs and meowing loudly. “See that bag? There’s a can of food and a litter box inside. Give her some food, okay? You better make friends with her right away,” he said, with a serious, experienced-man-of-the-world look on his face. “Hurry up. She’s hungry.”

  I had no choice but to hurry up and take the pl
astic litter box, canned food, and plastic bowls for food and water out of the old navy blue Puma sports bag that was placed just inside the door, “Now, the can opener, the can opener,” I muttered as I shuffled through the kitchen drawers and shelves. I asked Alexandre if he wanted a beer.

  “Why not?” he said, and, as he helped himself to a can of beer from the fridge, he added, “Oh, you’ve got spare ribs! Let’s have some, shall we?” Shoving the ribs into the oven and pulling the tab off his can of beer, he made the usual annoying sounds with his tongue, going tchut-tchut against his palate. This alerted the cat, which was very big for a female and covered with mixed patches of black and white. She had come up meowing in quest of food, and now she pointed her ears forward and twitched her whiskers as if wondering if there wasn’t a rat somewhere.

  Alexandre continued his tchut-tchuting and said in a sweet voice, “Tama, you’re so good at catching rats! You’ll help Natsuyuki, won’t you? Tchut-tchut.” Then suddenly it was, like, “What’s this?” and without waiting for an answer, he started to play the record that was on the turntable, turning up the volume so loud that Casals’ cello resounded with a tremendous roar, which made Tama jump, so I rushed to turn it down.

  “I feel like that little mouse the size of a rubber eraser that climbed inside Gorsch the Cellist’s cello,” I said.

  Alexandre asked his usual “What’s that about?” and though I tried to put him off with a bored “It’s nothing,” he wasn’t satisfied until he got a proper answer, so I had to give a detailed explanation of Gorsch the Cellist. “Hmm,” he said, “that sounds pretty interesting, I might read that book. Have you got a copy? If you do, can I borrow it?”

  So I brought one volume of the Chikuma edition of the collected works of Miyazawa Kenji from the bookshelf and showed it to him. “What?! How come such a simple story turns into a thick book like this? Don’t make me laugh. I don’t have time to read this,” he said, adding, “Right, Tama-chan?”