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.
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