Through The Eyes of A Cat

January 12, 2026

In Natsume Soseki’s first novel, he looks at the world through the eyes of a cat. The novel, appropriately named I Am A Cat (1905), uses this unusual perspective to cast a new eye on contemporary Japanese society, perceiving humankind as an undignified and irrational type of creature. The cat in question lives with a man named Mr. Sneaze (in my favourite translation), a particular type of academic nobody who, in turn, views himself as above the herd. What emerges is a strange hierarchy of looking-down, as Mr. Sneaze looks down on the rest of the world, including his friends (who in turn look down on him), but particularly his cat, who he views as an unthinking and unfeeling creature. But of course, all the while, his cat is looking down on him.

It’s a perfect set up for satire, with a built-in outsider perspective that is free from all suspicions of hypocrisy. The cat (who has no name) has his own foibles, for sure, but they pale in comparison to the ridiculous figures that pass through Sneaze’s living room. Among these are Coldmoon, an inveterate trickster; Waverhouse, an inveterate romantic; and Singleman, an inveterate Go player. Each of these can in turn be said to represent various trends among Japanese youth: the nihilist with no care for societal rules, the poet/scientist who sees hope in individual freedoms, and the classicist devoted to the purity of tradition. Mr. Sneaze himself has no such principles; he acts solely according to his own self-interest, following a haphazard and heteronomous set of moral values that only take shape when it comes time to criticize others.

Natsume Soseki’s choice of a cat as the narrator of his first story is an important one, besides the obvious opportunity for humour. Cats, particularly older ones, can appear to be philosophical creatures, at least when viewed with human eyes. They watch over us, keeping their distance, preserving their own world. As the world bustles on around them, they lie asleep in the corner, or stoically stare out the window. Our activities are unimportant to them; they will lie down on your keyboard when you’re hard at work, or stand in the way as you try to descend the stairs. At the same time, cats are childlike and ridiculous, chasing after cotton balls or pawing at strings. But when they do so, it’s almost as if they are overcome by their instincts, unwillingly breaking their facade of dignity.

A cat is an outsider who must live among the human world, bearing witness to the most intimate parts of our lives while still occupying an altogether different realm. And this is the same impression we continually get from Soseki’s later human protagonists: strangers in their own homes, who observe our world but do not participate.

Soseki’s knack for satire betrays a sense of cultural alienation, expressed initially in comedic works such as I Am A Cat and his second novel, Bocchan (1906), which follows a young schoolteacher who accepts a job out in the boonies. But as his career continued, he started to explore the more sombre side of being a man-out-of-place: an individual in a social world, who yearns for personal freedom but doesn’t know how to reach out and grab it. Many of Soseki’s human protagonists are cats, in a spiritual sense, but not by choice. They don’t stand aloof out of pride, but out of fear. In their insecurity, they look down on the world and up at it at the same time, struggling to decide whether they’re too good for this world or not good enough.

We see this immediately in Soseki’s next work, Kusamakura (1906). A young painter travels to a rural mountain town in search of a peaceful realm within which to work. His idea is that the people in this town will not be like all the people he knows back home, that their natural surroundings would make them less human — in a good way. “However you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live,” he says. He is tired of human society and wants the freedom that comes from staying in a foreign town where one has no reputation or duties. On his way up the mountain, he states: “If you let yourself become involved with worldly gossip past a certain point, the stench of the human world seeps in through the pores of your skin, and its grime begins to weigh you down.” And this is exactly what happens to him; as he becomes more enmeshed within the society of the town, and particularly an enigmatic girl he meets, he gets entirely distracted from his painting, until he is a painter in name only.

The “enigmatic girl” becomes a staple of Soseki’s works; she is who pulls the protagonist out from his retreated position, and forces him to stick his head out into the world. In earlier works, such as Sanshiro (1907), the protagonist fails to assert himself, but in later novels, such as And Then (1909), the enigmatic girl successfully pulls him from his stupor, much to the chagrin of society. It is worthwhile then to explore these two works more fully as case studies.

In Kusamakura and The Heredity of Taste (1906), the Enigmatic Girl appears, but her importance is secondary. Whether the young man in question successfully woos her, or even meets her in the latter case, is not the protagonist’s main worry. It is more of a passing fancy than anything else. It is not until Sanshiro that the love story takes centre stage (or at least, occupies a position hovering near the centre of the stage, for it’s difficult in any of these novels to narrow them down to one exact point.)

Sanshiro tells the story, if you can believe it, of a young man. He’s a student from Kumamoto, all the way on the Western island of Kyushu. He travels across the entire country to Tokyo in order to attend university, and is immediately overwhelmed by the type of people he meets there. He spends most of the time following a fellow student named Yojiro, a kind-hearted yet essentially careless individual who is secretly operating a scheme/campaign in order to get his friend hired as a professor at the university.

Throughout the course of these adventures, Sanshiro meets a girl named Mineko, the sister of one of his acquaintances. He immediately falls for her, but is unsure of how she views him. She is the object of several other men’s fancy, and seems hot and cold in Sanshiro’s presence. Sometimes, she is aloof; other times, it seems she is on the verge of letting her guard down given the right provocation. Sanshiro can’t tell whether she’s giving him signals, leading him on, or doing nothing at all. At one point, Mineko asks him if he knows how to translate the word, “迷子” (lit. lost child) into English, to which he says nothing, so she tells him her answer: “stray sheep.”

This phrase, “stray sheep,” sticks in Sanshiro’s head. It seems to sum up Mineko’s perception of him, but he can’t tell exactly what she means by it. Part of it must relate to him being a country boy in the big city, but there’s more to it than just that. Perhaps it signifies his inborn aloofness — for it’s not only in the city that he’s out of place. He left his home behind for a reason, and displays no signs of homesickness, often not bothering to read or respond to his mother’s letters. She keeps writing to him of a girl from their town who he clearly has some sort of connection with. Sanshiro never talks about any of this, but it’s as if Mineko can see right through him: he’s a man without a home, without a place, drifting along in the stream of other people’s lives, going through the motions of student life without actually occupying any sort of position within the school community. She’s daring him to do something; to do something not for others, but for himself — but he never does.

In And Then, we follow Daisuke, the youngest son of a wealthy family. His dad is a practical and active man, and his elder brother is fully embedded in the world of society and business. Daisuke, on the other hand, is idle. He’s older than Soseki’s previous protagonists — around thirty — but he has no occupation. He has an interest in the arts, but it doesn’t manifest itself in any sort of activity or passion. His core principles are based on the idea that the inactive, contemplative life is the correct way to live, and that all this bustling about isn’t getting anyone anywhere. However, there’s a sense of insecurity behind all this theorizing, as it seems strange to him that his “ideal” life should feel so empty.

An old school friend of Daisuke’s, Hiraoka, moves back into town. He’s down on his luck after some sort of incident at the business he was working at, so he’s in Tokyo looking for work. He asks Daisuke to inquire about a position at his family’s company, but Daisuke drags his feet. He can’t work up any enthusiasm about work, either in his own case or anyone else’s. Since work, for Daisuke, has no connection with a livelihood — he lives off an allowance from his family — it seems utterly meaningless.

Michiyo, Hiraoka’s wife, is the sister of a mutual friend of Daisuke and Hiraoka. We learn that Daisuke was fond of her back in the day, but decided to “give her up” for Hiraoka’s sake. Perhaps marriage reeked too much of earthly things for Daisuke’s liking, condemning him to the kind of workaday existence Hiraoka and his other friends have to live. But with Hiraoka always out and about looking for work (and later, drinking), Daisuke ends up often alone with Michiyo, and she seems to offer a way out of his rut.

Daisuke is paralyzed by indecision. According to society, his infatuation is wrong, but morally he can’t quite convince himself that it’s incorrect. It is yet another battle between his own will and the will of The World, and as usual he finds the result a stalemate. He’s unwilling to go along with what is normal and correct, but equally unwilling quite to strike out on his own. As individuals, the love between Michiyo and Daisuke is obvious, but as members of society, it’s impossible.

This disconnect between love and marriage is common throughout these early works. More than one novel ends with the Enigmatic Girl marrying someone else — usually a character we’ve never met. It’s as if marriage exists in a whole separate world than the type of infatuation our characters find themselves in, like the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. None of Soseki’s novels are about marriage, and yet they are almost all concerned with love — even in The Miner (1908), in which almost no female characters appear, there are two women hovering enigmatically in the background, serving as the reason our protagonist sets off on a long walk northwards from Tokyo with no particular destination in mind…

And Then similarly plays with the order of things, having the Enigmatic Girl marry the “wrong” person before the story even begins. After watching so many Soseki protagonists passively watch Enigmatic Girls drift away, we now see the aftermath: a slightly older man, still passively floating through life, who sees his enigmatic girl drift back into his world, and must make (or decide not to make) his decision once again.

An interesting meta-structure is taking form here. We are capturing similar stories in different moments, exploring the same themes with different parameters. Sometimes, the Enigmatic Girl only briefly appears; sometimes she stays a while before leaving; sometimes she’s come and gone already; sometimes she has come and gone and has now come back again; and sometimes she never left at all. The protagonists, all with different names and slightly varying backgrounds, may as well be the same man, re-living the same life wearing different clothes. It almost feels like something out of a story by Borges, infinite permutations of the same essential narrative, the same life, viewed as if from a different dimension where names and biographies are inconsequential variables easily cast aside.

Who is this man, this man who is the amalgamation of all these men? We can say a few things about him. He is artistic, in a sense. More accurately, we may say he is an aesthete, drawn to beautiful things that exist outside of everyday life. He is an Individual, in that he never quite feels himself embedded in society, but always apart, wondering when everything moved on without him. He is equal parts proud and insecure about this outside-ness, wondering whether it was a conscious choice he made or simply a result of weakness and passivity. He wonders about and admires women he sees from afar, but in the same way one might admire a painting. He has no interest in marriage, or even love in the sense of something shared between two people; his idea of love is Platonic and vague. Interestingly enough, he is never a writer. Often, he is a student (but rarely a very good one), and sometimes a painter, or at least interested in paintings. If he does read, it is always foreign novels, and he rarely understands them.

Let’s not take this opportunity to check Natsume Soseki’s biography. What is the use? Why would he write about this man so many times if he was not this man himself? Or at least, if he was not once this man, or felt himself becoming this man, or some combination of the two. I happen to know Soseki’s life story, at least in the abridged way one can know anyone’s life story, and it shone no more light on him than any of his novels do. His life story is sad in a commonplace sort of way, hyper-specific and yet inherently plausible. It is the life story of a person that exists in The World. But that’s not important to us, not at all. What use is The World? I’ve seen it; you’ve seen it. We live right in it and we can hardly ever get out. The only way out is fiction, using the word fiction to mean almost any artistic endeavour: painting, music, poetry, film, etc. Soseki’s biography is interesting, but his fiction is transcendent.

Soseki, like most of us, lived one life. But this man he writes of has lived several. He lived all of them densely, by which I mean that he lived them fully within the confines of the brief period depicted in each novel. Sanshiro only exists for a few short months, then he disappears, to be replaced by Daisuke, who too lives a rich and complex life all within the space of half a year, to be replaced by Sosuke, and etc. The events that occur within their brief lifespan are so important, so fundamental, that everything else becomes irrelevant. Sanshiro is defined by his brief non-relationship with Mineko; outside of this, he is nothing. What would be one small footnote in a normal man’s life becomes the focal point of an entire world.

Through all of these worlds, viewed as if through a microscope — viewed, as it were, through the eyes of a cat — we are presented with a life, a worldview, and an entire framework by which to understand the events that surround us, and the emotions that they bring forth within us. So many times, I am sat somewhere observing the world, and I think, “Natsume Soseki wrote about this.” He didn’t linger or pontificate or ramble on and on — for that’s not his style — but he commented on it and captured it, usually within one brief sentence. Whether it’s a mannerism common to a certain type of person, or a feeling we get in a certain situation, or just the way something looks when you see it from a certain angle.

All this is a result of careful observation, but observation comes at a cost. When we are observing, we are often forgetting to live. Many of Soseki’s protagonists make this mistake, allowing their lives to drift on without them as they stand there watching. In a sense, Soseki’s novels are the ultimate embodiment of an artistic worldview, where what is unreal and imaginary takes precedent over what is real and present. His novels are about men who see the people around them as characters in a novel, failing to understand that they’re not going to sit around waiting for the narrator, but instead will eventually have to move on with their lives. It is only by jumping into the story that our heroes can make any impact.

It is interesting that in the one novel where this happens, And Then, the novel ends as soon as Daisuke makes his decision, and we don’t get to see its consequences. Once the narrator properly enters the story as a character, the book is over, because we no longer have anyone left to stand by and observe.

In most cases however, the protagonist remains aloof. He can interact with the real world, but never feels quite present. Instead, he occupies some sort of parallel world, occupying the same places but not the same reality. In this sense, he is the same as a household cat. They may share the same rooms as us, hearing and seeing everything we say and do, but they can’t jump in and participate — at least, not in any significant way. All they can do is sit and watch, patiently observing and judging from afar. When Soseki wrote the famous words, “I am a cat,” I wonder if he realized to what extent he was telling the truth.