Cats and Noburu Wataya

I have three cats at home, Zelda, Ziggy & Assad, and they all know their names and (usually) come when called. (Above are Ziggy - on the left - and Assad). Like Murakami, I really like cats, and suspect they are very wise as well as independent. Jean Cocteau said that a cat is "the visible soul of the house" - and perhaps this explains why Toru and Kumiko's cat mysteriously disappeared - the house had lost its soul. I found this tribute to someone's special cat on another blog (gingerblue.com):

"She kept me company through many lonely nights in graduate school. She’s sat in many windows, peering out into the darkness waiting for me (now, for all of us) to come home. She quietly moves through the house with her tail up and her nose sniffing. If she gets antsy, she’ll yowl. But not often. She greets us all every morning with drawn-out blinks of her beautiful copper eyes and a quiet calm, unlike the other two cats, who yowl and howl and demand breakfast."

 When Toru's cat comes back after a year away it is a wonderful piece about the consolation the cat gives him after his months of isolation and loneliness. Here's just an extract:

"Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.” (378)

This connection between Toru and his cat, as between any human being and an animal, strikes me as quite miraculous. Without speech there is a bond, sometimes stronger and deeper than between human beings because maybe language gets in the way.

So, Toru's cat is given a new name, Mackerel, and the old association with the horrid brother-in-law is over. Kumiko's brother's character seems to epitomize the fake sincerity of a lot of tv people, especially politicians. He is a 'hollow man' and an evil presence in the novel, the antagonist in effect. In the long section about Noboru Wataya there was a comment about him (and similar people) that I really liked:

"It seems to me that certain patterns of thought are so simple and one-sided that they become irresistible" (74)

This is what makes NW so massively popular in the media, I think. Toru implies this habit of thinking came from NW's mother who:

" ...whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question 'How do I look?' . . . Anything that failed to enter her narrow field of vision ceased to have meaning for her." (75)

I have met quite a lot of people like this - who because they are too lazy to find out for themselves either steal/borrow other people's opinions - or just lift opinions from others that fit their prejudices or their place in society. One wonders if such people really know how to think at all. However, this is a little different than what NW does (1st quote) where Murakami is highlighting how easy it is to adopt one-sided simple opinions on issues. In fact, as Oscar Wilde said, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."