I Am a Cat

**Natsume Soseki's Debut Novel**

**Born from a Single Reading at a Literary Gathering, It Ran for Eleven Chapters**

**Parodied by a Young Yukio Mishima**

**Adapted for Film, NHK Drama, and Anime Across Generations**

*"I am a cat. As yet I have no name." Neither, in the end, does anyone else spared his gaze.*

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First published in the magazine *Hototogisu* in 1905, ***I Am a Cat*** is Natsume Soseki's debut novel, narrated entirely from the perspective of a nameless cat living in the household of middle-school English teacher Chinno Kushami. Through the cat's eyes, the story observes a circle of eccentric intellectuals—Meitei, Kangetsu, Tofu, and Dokusen—and satirizes human folly with sharp wit and quiet charm. What began as a single short story to be read aloud at a literary gathering proved so popular it grew into an eleven-chapter serialization, elevating *Hototogisu* from a haiku journal into a major literary magazine.

This is not a novel with a plot. It is **a digression in the tradition of Sterne and Swift**, a vessel for Soseki's misanthropy and sense of the absurd, dressed as the idle observations of a household pet. Materialism, marriage, the empty debates of intellectuals—all of it is dismantled by a creature no one in the story thinks to take seriously. **The cat says nothing anyone listens to. That is exactly why it sees everything.**

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*\[Quote placeholder — let me know if you'd like a specific critic or writer quoted here\]* *—\[Author Name\], \[title/role\]*

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The cultural footprint of ***I Am a Cat*** in Japan is immeasurable. Parodies followed almost immediately—*I Am a Rat*, *I Am a Shop Boy*, even a young **Yukio Mishima's** *I Am an Ant*. The novel was adapted into film in 1936 and 1975, brought to NHK television in 1963 with **Hisaya Morishige** as Kushami and **Kiyoshi Atsumi** voicing the cat, and reimagined as a 1982 anime directed by **Rin Taro**. The protagonist was modeled on a real stray that wandered into Soseki's home; when it died in 1908, Soseki sent formal death notices to friends and mourned it in the essay "The Cat's Grave."

*You will spend the whole novel watching humans through a cat's eyes.* *By the end, you may no longer be sure which one of you was actually being observed.*