Tonight’s story is another pet one, and like last night’s it’s a tragic one. Sorry to all the pet lovers out there… The story ends with the cat killing itself, although it does not specify how. In my painting I decided it would be by knife. I imagined a situation in which the cat was so ashamed or overcome with what it did that it performed sort of a samurai-like seppuku. But it may have drowned itself, or strangled itself, or who knows what else… The jealousy and resentment the old cat felt, along with the guilt at killing its master, are not expressed in words in the story at all. It’s something we have to fill in ourselves. However I like it better without those being spelled out for us. It’s part of the spartan style that so many yokai stories have, which I am always gushing about, but I personally find it so much more effective than when characters thoughts are explicitly spelled out for the reader.

The Injury Caused by an Old Cat

This happened recently.

In a townhouse in Muromachi 1-chōme, there lived an elderly man who loved cats and kept one as a pet. As it grew older, his cat grew exceedingly large and could no longer catch mice.

His wife had recently taken in a kitten, and she found the old cat a bit bothersome. She favored the kitten, and she would smack the old cat on the head whenever it came near.

One day, when the wife was napping upstairs, the old cat bit her on the throat. The wife screamed, but nobody heard her until finally, someone from a neighboring house discovered her and came running. As the household members and other people rushed over, the cat fled.

The wife died shortly after, and it is said the cat retreated to the back room of the house and killed itself.