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.

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.

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

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.