Today is the day we return from Miss Kodo-oba’s grandparents’ house to our usual home. The Honored Mother sweeps with a broom and wipes down the plumbing fixtures, while the Honored Father gathers up the rubbish and closes the storm shutters. I watched from within the carrying-case into which Miss Kodo-oba had crammed me as the last of the shutters was drawn shut.

Their tasks all concluded, the three of them stood gazing at the house, which was now once again to belong to its ghosts. So much time had gone into tidying the interior that evening had already fully set in. A mere three days it had been, and yet I had grown quite accustomed to the cries of the insects. The surroundings were growing dim now—a matter of no trouble at all for us of the feline race, but likely making it difficult for human eyes to distinguish one thing from another.

“Ahh, back to reality, huh. I can’t believe I have work again tomorrow,” Miss Kodo-oba grumbled from the driver’s seat. “Must be nice for you, Dad—retiring soon. Every day a Sunday. I’m jealous.”

“Every day a Sunday.” The Honored Father made a sound as if to say hmph. “That’s true. But then I’d just turn into a couch potato. No, I ought to be doing something worthwhile.”

“Oh, it’s fine to take it easy for a while,” said the Honored Mother, smiling wryly in the passenger seat. “You’ve worked all this time, after all.”

“Well—that may be so, but still.”

The Honored Father’s eyes were fixed, with unusual intensity, upon the roof of the now thoroughly darkened house. The car pulled away quietly.

We of the feline race are no psychologists, yet we are adept at reading the moods of humans—and I am no exception. Hearing the tone of his voice, I was struck, of a sudden, by the realization that the Honored Father’s retirement was fast approaching, and I found myself growing concerned for his state of mind. While he continued to speak earnestly of how the future ought to be, the truth was that he harbored deep anxiety over the looming loss of his social identity.

Given this, the reason he had murmured “how nostalgic” at the cry of the higurashi, in this unfamiliar rural house, suddenly made sense to me. This, indeed, was the answer to the riddle of “summer nostalgia” I had set myself.

Mono no Aware

Here lies the core of my reasoning. First, there is a concept central to the way the people of these islands perceive the changing seasons: mono no aware.

I have already mentioned the following waka:

This verse is built upon a dual structure —a surface layer and a deeper one beneath. The surface is summer; the depth, autumn. In the phrase "though autumn has come," the poet’s mind is already tuned to autumn. Yet, wherever one looks, the surrounding scenery remains unmistakably summer—only for the mind to be pulled right back to autumn at the sound of the wind. It is a structure of back-and-forth movement between the two.

It is the depth of the shadow that makes the light shine all the brighter. By becoming conscious of autumn, the dazzle of the summer sun and the whiteness of the towering cumulonimbus clouds are impressed upon the mind all the more vividly. Thinking of the unavoidable autumn soon to come, one feels a faint touch of sorrow. This is a classic example of the concept the Japanese call mono no aware.

Mono no aware is an aesthetic sensibility that perceives the fleeting impermanence hidden within every kind of change—the turning of summer into autumn, a child growing into an adult, life moving inexorably toward death, or, more modestly—though far more critically to a feline like myself—the kibble I devoured with relish yesterday, today left entirely untouched—and finds within that transience a tangled sentiment of joy, anger, sorrow, and delight all at once.

Echoes of Stand by Me

Interestingly, there exists a film built upon the exact same dual structure as the waka above: that classic of the coming-of-age genre, Stand by Me. In this case, the surface layer is the summer vacation, while the depth is Labor Day—the definitive end of summer. Every one of the boys understands that Labor Day is looming, and that their vacation will soon draw to a close. There is no escaping it, no matter what they do. Precisely because of this, the adventure of their lone summer shines all the brighter, and they sense within it a weight far greater than the ordinary.

Losing an Identity

Now, let us turn our gaze once more upon the Honored Father. He remains, for the moment, a working man, holding fast to his role within the company. For now, at least. Yet, he is acutely aware that retirement is no longer a distant prospect. Here, too, a dual structure has taken shape: his present self, whose identity is bound up with his role at the company (the surface), and his post-retirement self who must one day forfeit that identity (the depth). And it was at this precise intersection that the Honored Father found himself utterly exposed to a symbolic system cultivated over more than a thousand years.

An Exquisite Evasion

Headlights cut through the gloom of a rural road, virtually untouched by streetlamps, as the car surged forward under Miss Kodo-oba’s steering. Anemoia, it seems, shares a common thread with the Honored Father’s present condition: it is a sanctuary sought in an unlived past. A soul reduced to anonymity, a self teetering beneath the weight of reality, yearns nostalgically for a faraway culture it has never known—such as these very islands. Yet, this is merely an exquisite evasion, a beautiful distraction from the immediacy of the now.
Fortunately, or otherwise, we felines are spared such intricate delusions. At this very moment, my sole desire is to be delivered, at once, from the confines of this stifling carrying-case and its relentless, trembling agitation.

Reference and Sources

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To the people of this land, it would seem, the middle of August holds something more than a mere date upon the calendar.

Crammed into a carrying-case, I was brought to a house I had never before seen. It was, I am given to understand, the dwelling in which the Honored Mother had lived in her own childhood, together with her parents — who would be, to Miss Kodo-oba, grandparents.

Both of them have long since passed on, and no one dwells there now. It was, then, taking advantage of the summer recess granted to the Honored Father and Miss Kodo-oba, that the family had come to let the air through the place.

While I, from the corner of the room, conducted my own inspection of the premises for safety, the Honored Father, wielding an unaccustomed brush-cutter with a great roar, mowed down weeds grown taller than his own height; the Honored Mother threw open the storm shutters, drew the futons from the closet, and laid them out along the sun-warmed veranda; and Miss Kodo-oba drove off in the car to fetch provisions. By this deft division of labor, seldom witnessed in ordinary days, life returned to a vacant house haunted, until then, by nothing but ghosts.

Past the middle of the afternoon, the Honored Father, his mowing at last concluded, sat himself upon the engawa, a traditional Japanese wooden veranda, fanning himself with a paper fan as he gazed upon the mounded grass heaped where a field had once, perhaps, been tilled. It was about this time that I too concluded my inspection and took my seat beside him. An acrid smoke, of a kind I had never before encountered, assailed my nose. This, I surmised, must be what men call mosquito-coil incense.

I looked out anew upon the broad view afforded by the engawa. The garden below, buried beneath the green grass the Honored Father had heaped up, gave no clear sign of where the property itself might end, and beyond it stretched rice paddies and hills as far as the eye could see. It was a far cry indeed from the house in which I ordinarily dwell, where potted plants are crammed cheek by jowl upon a paved patch of ground scarcely larger than what we of the feline race, in an expression I find rather insulting, call “a cat’s forehead.”

But above all, the sound was different. A dry rustle of wings rubbing together. Cries of every kind. It was, in short, an overwhelming paradise of insects. And above all else, that distinctive, ringing kana-kana-kana— the cry of the higurashi, a cicada whose call is said to herald the end of summer.

“Ah, the higurashi,” said the Honored Father. “Somehow, it puts me in rather a nostalgic mood.”

“Whatever are you talking about,” said the Honored Mother, folding a futon. “Your own family home is smack in the middle of Tokyo. You haven’t a relation in the countryside to your name. You must know the higurashi only from the television.”

“That may well be so,” protested the Honored Father, “but there’s such a thing as a gen-fū-kei — a primal landscape. Things like this, surely, are carved into one’s very DNA.”

“They call that ‘anemoia,’ apparently,” put in Miss Kodo-oba, drinking a bottle of ramune in the depths of the room. The glass marble inside the bottle gave a clinking rattle as it rolled. “Americans, born and raised in America, apparently feel ‘nostalgic’ looking at Japanese landscapes they’ve only ever seen in anime.”

“Don’t lump me in with the Americans,” the Honored Father’s protest continued.

That such an emotion is called nostalgia — a longing for things past — is, of course, a fact known to us of the feline race, solely as an intellectual concept. There is said to exist some paradox involving a cat and one Schrödinger, but we cats are, at bottom, creatures that live forever in the present moment. A longing for the past is thus, as a concept, one we find difficult to grasp. And yet, were the Honored Father merely recalling his own childhood, I could understand it well enough — I myself am not without memory of certain afternoons spent tussling with my littermates in my kittenhood. But what of the Honored Father’s case here? At the mere sound of the higurashi’s cry, a feeling of nostalgia wells up within him — for an experience he has never once had. This may run parallel to the mystery of the Honored Mother, who eats watermelon though she does not even like it. Why should the mere hearing of a sound spontaneously conjure up the emotion called nostalgia?

Upon this riddle, of no concern whatsoever to one such as myself who lives always in the present, I resolved to attempt some consideration, even as I groomed myself.

Scenery Designed to Be Missed

The first explanation, touched upon a little already, is historical and cultural. The people of these islands have, over long ages, polished the scenery into a symbol reflecting the human heart. The landscape is no mere backdrop, but the very protagonist. And this scenery encompasses not sight alone, but hearing and smell besides. Indeed, a poet of more than a thousand years past composed a verse of just this kind — that though the calendar declared autumn to have come, nothing of autumn was visible to the eye, summer lingering everywhere in sight; and yet, in the sound of the wind and the touch of it upon the skin, the poet was startled to find the unmistakable presence of autumn already there. The verse runs thus:

Here, sensory perception and the emotion it evokes are sung as a single, indivisible whole. To us of the feline race this is difficult to grasp — though perhaps it resembles the way the faintest rustle of an insect’s wing instantly flips a cat’s hunting switch.

The courtiers, in their utmost refinement, brought forth a still deeper poignancy through this double-exposure of landscape and sentiment. In it may be seen the passage of the seasons, and the corresponding movement of the heart. This system of symbols, changing its outward form across the ages, was handed down unbroken, until at last it came to be reflected even in the backgrounds of animated films — mastered so thoroughly, indeed, as to seem second nature.

The moving image cannot direct its effects at smell, touch, or taste, but it can act upon sight and sound. And so, through unwitting and continuous exposure to this cultural apparatus, even a man such as the Honored Father — a middle-aged man nearing retirement who, unlike myself, has never once chased a dragonfly — finds the pre-installed switch of nostalgia within him duly flipped at the mere sound of the higurashi‘s cry. The Honored Father’s protest that it is “carved into his DNA” is, scientifically speaking, a most dubious claim; and yet, in a cultural sense, it is not so wide of the mark as it might seem. What is carved into his DNA is not any memory of having heard the higurashi‘s cry, but the symbolic system of these islands themselves — a system meticulously engineered through the ages to make one long for the higurashi.

Borrowed Fragments

The second explanation is psychological. It is true that the Honored Father can only ever have heard the higurashi’s cry by way of the television. But he can hardly be a stranger to the merciless glare of a summer afternoon, or the close, muggy smell of grass. That is to say: though he has never experienced the whole of a rural Japanese summer, he has already experienced the “fragments” that compose it. In this way, it would seem, humans use such shared fragments as a trigger, recall scenes and feelings from their own past, projecting them onto the fiction before them.

The Shortcut Through the Nose

The third explanation is neuroscientific. The sense of smell connects directly to the limbic system — to the amygdala, which governs the emotions, and to the hippocampus, where memory is formed and fixed. Scent, in other words, is a medium capable of shaking loose emotion and memory directly, bypassing the frontal lobe — the very seat of reason. It is no wonder, then, that I myself, upon smelling the newly cut grass a while ago — though I cannot say I grew nostalgic for it — found myself recalling my own kittenhood. Did not one Monsieur Proust, too, open the door to memories past by way of the taste and smell of a madeleine dipped in tea? How much more so, then, the Honored Father. That the memories and feelings once bound up with the smell of cut grass — the particular nature of which I cannot begin to guess — should be suddenly reawakened here is nothing to marvel at.

The Fusion of the Three

When these three forces fuse together — a sort of ‘demon fusion,’ if you will — the result, summoned forth by whatever the five senses happen to catch, is a phantom nostalgia that, by all rights, should not exist at all, yet is conjured up within the brain regardless.

It would not do to dismiss the Honored Father, declaring himself “nostalgic” at the mere cry of the higurashi, as simply a man easily swept along. Historical and cultural pressures more than a thousand years in the making bear down upon him from every direction. Given as much, even so unscientific a piece of nonsense as “carved into my DNA” ought perhaps to be forgiven him. The Honored Father, even now, is measuring with a ruler the diameter of the opening of his emptied ramune bottle against the glass marble within, calculating the approximate internal pressure of the vessel.

The smoke of the mosquito coil trails white across the engawa, gilded by the slanting light.

Imagining the humans, each within their own skull, earnestly consuming a “homeland they never possessed,” I found myself wishing to consider, a little further, this other strange fever of summer that drives men to distraction — the thing they call nostalgia.

Reference and Sources

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The dwelling in which I chiefly eat and sleep is an old, detached house. Besides myself, three humans reside here. Two of them form a pair; the remaining one is, it would seem, their offspring. This word “offspring” I use in the strictly genetic sense — for though the creature in question passed into adulthood some considerable time ago, unlike her younger brother, she has yet to depart the parental roof.

Among cats, this would be accounted a failure of parental discipline; yet these humans, far from lamenting it, appear rather to welcome their child’s continued presence.

The offspring herself, for her part, refers to herself by a term of internet slang — “kodo-oba,” a portmanteau roughly meaning “the grown daughter who never left the nest.” Its precise nuance eludes me, though her manner in using it suggests it is not, on the whole, a title worn with pride. In deference to her own choice of words, I shall call her, throughout, Miss Kodo-oba.

It was this same Miss Kodo-oba who, one summer evening, sat with her Honored Father and Honored Mother eating watermelon in front of the television, while I — my belly pleasantly full — dozed in the corridor nearby.

What roused my interest, on this particular occasion, was the sight of a great striped cat, one of my own kind, conveying a small girl within the folds of his belly and racing off upon the wind. This was the Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro. Such films, I am given to understand, are frequently broadcast during a certain weekly movie slot the household calls “Kin-Ro.”

That a mere cat such as myself should possess this piece of knowledge ought to surprise no one. We of the feline race know rather more than humans suppose — and are wise enough, precisely, to know that were this fact to become known, our present tranquil existence would swiftly come to an end.

As the three of them sat gathered round the low table, watching the same program together in that particular communion humans call a family gathering, the Honored Mother, stacking the rinds of her finished watermelon upon a plate, remarked:

“Ah, nothing says summer like watermelon and Ghibli.”

“Mom, you don’t even really like watermelon,” put in Miss Kodo-oba.

“Still, one must eat it,” the Mother replied. “Otherwise it doesn’t feel like summer.”

We of the feline race have lived alongside humankind for how many years now, and there remains much we cannot fathom. This is one such mystery. Why should the Honored Mother eat a food she does not particularly enjoy, for no better reason than that it is summer?

Consuming the Seasons

Though I cannot fathom it, I believe I grasp the reason. To the people of this far-eastern island nation, the seasons are no mere meteorological phenomenon. They are, rather, a highly codified trigger for emotion — and it is through the consumption of culture that these people experience both the season and the feeling that season is meant to evoke.

The Birth of “High-Context”

The seed of this notion may already be found in the Man’yōshū, a poetry anthology compiled from the latter half of the seventh century onward. Even so, the earliest poems there are simple things — “spring has come, how joyful” and the like. The verse of that age was closer to a kind of prayer-poem posted in celebration of the planting season, a plea for good harvest rendered in words.

The seasons, at that stage, remained subordinate to daily life; to call this “artifice” would be, frankly, to flatter it.

This relation of subordination was inverted, and the season became an independent object of appreciation, only around the compilation of the Kokin Wakashū in the early tenth century.

The reason, by one account, lies in urban living. In the planned capital of Heijō-kyō, poets found themselves physically severed from nature, and from this severance arose, paradoxically, an “idealized beauty” — nature admired from a cool, objective distance.

Only once removed from the mud beneath one’s nails, and from the creepy-crawlies that lodge there, does one begin to speak of the humble wildflowers blooming above as objects of aesthetic appreciation.

This is not unlike the way a house cat — a creature by nature disinclined to conflict, who in the wild or as a stray would fight over territory to secure its prey, but who as a house cat has no such need — nonetheless throws playful punches and engages in mock wrestling matches purely for sport.

Against this backdrop of urbanization, Sei Shōnagon opened her Heian-era blog, The Pillow Book, with the line: “Spring, the dawn.”

Sei Shōnagon was lady-in-waiting to the Empress, tutored from childhood by a poet father, and by any measure one of the foremost cultural figures of her court. In today’s terms, one might say she held degrees from either Oxford or Yale.

And this woman, in the city within a city that was the imperial court, offers nothing more than “Spring, the dawn.” No verb. No explanation. She merely adds, “the sky just beginning to whiten” —some observed detail, and no more.

Those cultivated enough to read The Pillow Book — chiefly those with some experience of court life — evidently shared enough of a common frame that nothing further needed saying.

This, I would submit, is an early and rather pure specimen of what students of this culture have come to call its “high-context” nature: the premise that among those who sufficiently share a sensibility, a single phrase suffices, and nothing more need be spoken.

The Codification of Summer

As the ages passed, the objects signifying each season, and the emotions those objects were meant to evoke, became fixed. In particular, seasonal motifs hardened into a set of “proper conventions” applied not only to poetry but to Japanese art broadly.

In the tea ceremony, for instance, to decorate a spring gathering with autumnal motifs such as pampas grass is considered a breach of spatial harmony roughly equivalent, in the feline world, to a household lacking any scratching post whatsoever.

Taken this far alone, the practice differs little from Western allegory — the depiction of crocuses in spring or robins in winter being likewise mere “fixed symbols.”

What distinguishes Japan is that these poetic symbols were elevated into full “seasonal, limited-time experiential events.”

In the Heian period, for example, the nobility are said to have held gatherings at waterside pavilions called izumidono, there to savor the cool breeze off the water in summer. In elegance this falls somewhat — indeed, considerably — short of the mark, but in modern terms, the event might best be compared to visiting a fountain display in the park at the height of summer, beer in hand.

Such events, moreover, were held only in their designated season, and never at any other time of year.

By the Edo period, in the eighteenth century, this custom had spread to the common populace, and a lifestyle of “consuming the proper seasonal conventions” reached its full form: pleasure boating enjoyed and fireworks watched in summer; dumplings eaten and the moon viewed in autumn.

Such events were woven not just into annual festivals, but into the very fabric of daily life.

The Refinement of Futility

In short, when the Honored Mother eats watermelon she does not particularly like while watching Ghibli, this is by no means a personal whim.

She is merely carrying out, faithfully, a “code of seasonal consumption” cultivated over some twelve hundred years. For these people, without the consumption of culture, it is not truly summer — nor can the emotions proper to summer be truly felt.

We of the feline race need only stretch our bellies upon the cool boards of the corridor floor to enjoy summer to the fullest. It was only later that I realized the act of eating watermelon one does not even like is, in itself, an ordeal and an exercise in futility — and yet, perhaps, this is the very essence of culture—a quiet, invisible force that shapes how we experience time, memory, and the changing of seasons.

Reference and Sources

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How many years have passed since my kin first took up residence among the humans of that land? From the age when oxen drew their carts to the age when electric motors drive them along, the experience of observing human society with a cold and level eye, all the while basking in the sun, is a privilege beyond price.

Here, then, I shall discourse upon the curiosities of human life from a polite distance. Rather than entangling myself in their affairs, I intend to offer an objective — that is to say, a properly feline — examination of the incomprehensible customs and ways of living of humankind.

In this I follow a great predecessor: a nameless cat who, over a century ago, surveyed a Japanese household with a satirist’s unblinking eye, and lent that gaze to a great novelist’s pen. It is in his shadow, and at a respectful distance, that I take up my own study.

I should note, however, one point of personal weakness: I am fond of fish. Let that much be stated plainly, before we proceed to loftier matters.

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