「世界から猫が消えたなら」

I bought the book purely for its cover. Love it! 'If Cats Disappeared From The World' (published in 2012) by film producer and sometime writer Genki Kawamura, and translated by Eric Selland into English in 2018. 川村元気の小説「世界から猫が消えたなら」.

The story is not about cats. Definitely not quite about them although the protagonist has a cat. So the protagonist is not named. We only know that he's a postman in his 30s with terminal brain cancer. The Devil offers him a trade- an extra day of life in return for giving up an item that the whole world will miss. This is the part where it becomes a little fantastical. Well, to have the entire human population give up something to extend your life. Why not? Except you don't get to choose. The Devil chooses.

The protagonist has extra days, and the choices are done from Monday to Sunday. First to go are phones, then movies,  Thursday is clocks, i.e time. Then The last item to disappear from the world will be the cats. And the protagonist doesn't want that to happen. Along with the black and white cat he owns, named Cabbage (キャベツ), he also holds dear a memory of his mother because this is the cat she adopted; he remembers his childhood and his parents. On Sunday, he writes a letter to his father and he chooses Death.

土曜日。僕は世界から「猫」を消さないと選択した。そして僕は最後の日に備えるため身支度を始める。

I actually watched that 2016 film adaptation directed by Akira Nagai. I didn't seek out the book to read then. Chanced upon this translation at Kinokuniya, and since it's in English, I decided to be lazy and read this. Hahahaha. I just can't deal with the name of the Devil- the English translation is 'Aloha', which is 「アロハ」. I thought he would name it yōkai-something-something or just refer to the shuten-dōji. I guess not.

On the one hand, they say that only humans have a concept of death. Cats don't see it coming. It doesn't cause them fear and anxiety like it does humans. And then humans end up keeping cats as pets, despite our angst over mortality, even though we know that the cat will die long before we do, causing the owner untold grief. 

But then again, human beings can never grieve their own death. Death is always something that happens to others around them. When you boil it down, the death of a cat is't so different from the death of a human. 

When I thought about it this way I finally understood why it is that we humans keep cats as pets. There's a limit to how well we know ourselves. We don't know what we look like to others and we can't know our own future, and we can't know what our own death will be like. And that's why we need cats. It's just like my mother said. Cats don't need us. It's human beings who need cats.