‘And then if we do complement each other, maybe, you think, we oughta get married?’
Yuki looked down and then she squeezed Masashi’s hand tightly.
‘Let’s hope we can find a good place to live.’
Yuki’s reply coincided with the announcement of the train’s departure, and Masashi squeezed her hand back in response.
FIN
Read on for an extract from
THE GOODBYE CAT
by
Hiro Arikawa
The Goodbye Cat
ASMALL DISH OF SOY sauce sat on the dining table. A couple of grains of rice floated in it, left over from breakfast, no doubt. The dining table was covered by a light-blue tablecloth printed with a random pattern of small flowers.
Kota Sakuraba placed a palm into the soy sauce, then pushed it firmly on to the tablecloth, being careful to avoid the flowers. He left his palm there for a bit, then lifted it to reveal a small, soy sauce-coloured plum blossom print.
Not bad, not bad at all.
Gazing at his work, Kota again dipped his palm in the soy sauce. Then again, and again. More and more soy sauce-coloured plum flowers bloomed on the blue cloth.
I’m in the zone today.
He was about to make a fourth and a fifth print when—
‘Hiromi! Stop that!’ Mum scolded.
Damn, I’m busted, thought Kota, ears pinned back against his head.
And then—
‘Did I do something?’
It was Hiromi, in the hallway, peeking uncertainly into the living room. He was the Sakuraba family’s second son.
Kota was the Sakurabas’ third-eldest son – scratch that, cat – but Kota considered himself the second eldest, with Hiromi as the third in line.
‘Goodness,’ Mum said, seeing Hiromi in the doorway. She burst out laughing. ‘Sorry! I’m wrong. It’s Kota. He’s being an artist again.’
That’s what the Sakuraba family called it, when Kota made his little paw prints: he was being an artist.
Kota found this hard to fathom, since it wasn’t like he was painting a picture.
‘You’re at it again, eh?’ Hiromi said, coming over and giving Kota a gentle flick of the finger on his forehead.
‘Please don’t do that, Kota,’ Mum said. ‘Our tablecloths have your paw prints all over them.’ She grabbed Kota under his belly and wiped his soy-soaked paw vigorously with a damp dish cloth. Kota didn’t like feeling wet, and so quickly withdrew his paw and began to lick it.
‘Hey, Mum, I wanted to say the same thing to you: please don’t do that. I don’t like these false accusations.’
‘Ah, sorry. It just came out. I never make that mistake with Masahiro.’
The mistake Mum always made was to mix up Hiromi and Kota’s names. She never called Masahiro, who was Hiromi’s elder brother, Kota by mistake. All three shared the same Chinese character in their written names, though in Kota’s case, it was pronounced differently.
‘Well, it seems like it’s the youngest child’s fate to be confused with the family cat.’
‘Really?’ asked Mum.
‘I looked into it,’ said Hiromi. ‘My friends and I talked about it at school. The ones that get called the wrong name are all the youngest in the family.’
‘Well, what do you know,’ Mum said, as she attempted to scrub away Kota’s paw prints from the tablecloth. ‘Masahiro’s left home, hasn’t he? So if I’m going to mistake anyone’s name, Hiromi, you’re the only one still around.’
‘What do you mean?’ Hiromi shot back with a smile. ‘You’ve been doing it since I was a kid. Mistaking me and Kota.’
Mum just laughed it off. ‘I’m going to have to wash this,’ she said, folding her arms and looking disapprovingly at the tablecloth. ‘How did Kota learn to do that naughty trick, anyway?’ she wondered aloud.
Mum’s familiar response, to which Kota wrinkled his nose.
That is no naughty trick. It’s a dry run.
Kota was honing his skills at making paw prints, readying himself for when the time came.
HIS EARLIEST MEMORY WAS OF being terribly cold.
During the rainy season twenty years ago, for whatever reason his mother had left him behind.
His eyes still hadn’t fully opened. Crawling out of the space behind a wall where they’d been sleeping, he searched everywhere for the mother cat’s warmth. Instead, he was hit by drops of cold, drizzly rain.
In the normal course of things he would have passed away soon after that, if he had not been rescued by the father of the Sakuraba family.
The Sakurabas already had a cat: a Persian with an abnormality in its iris that meant the pet shop was about to get rid of it. Mr Sakuraba rescued this cat, too. He was the kind of person who, if he crossed paths with a cat in trouble, could not simply walk on by.
So you are one lucky cat, the Persian, named Diana, said, as she let the motherless kitten suck at her teats. Mr Sakuraba, rather clumsily, often fed him milk, but the need to suck at a warm body with arms and legs like his mother’s could not be met by a plastic bottle.
‘I want to give him milk too!’ their son, Masahiro, whined.
Diana told the kitten that a human sibling was on its way, and that Masahiro would become an older brother. The pregnant human was in the hospital, she added.
‘No. It’s too tricky for you to feed him, Masahiro – I’ll do it.’
This was true, because once when Masahiro tried to feed him a bottle of milk, he stuck the teat so far down the kitten’s throat, he coughed for hours afterwards.
Apparently while the father was out during the day, he’d asked Mrs Sakuraba’s friends, women from the neighbourhood, to look after him.
He’d been drinking milk every three hours, which became every five hours and then three times a day, by which time the kitten’s eyes had fully opened.
It was the day that Mrs Sakuraba and her new baby, their second son, came home from the hospital.
‘Whoa, he looks like a monkey! What a weird face!’ Masahiro yelled when he came back from kindergarten, earning a slap from his mother. Diana, though, was inclined to agree with him.
You looked just like a monkey yourself, she thought.
Mrs Sakuraba had really been looking forward to seeing the kitten her husband had rescued while she was at the hospital. After getting the new baby to sleep, she came over to take a proper look.
‘My, what a beautiful silver tabby!’
This was the moment the kitten first learned what his fur colour was called.
‘Have you decided on a name yet?’
‘Not yet,’ Mr Sakuraba said a bit evasively.
‘But hasn’t it been two weeks since you found him?’
‘I wasn’t sure we were going to keep him, and if we give him a name, then we’ll get attached.’
Mr Sakuraba had planned to wait until his wife was back before making a decision about keeping him. But she had no qualms at all.
‘Let’s adopt him,’ she said. ‘The kitten seems to get on well with Diana, too,’ she added. ‘You’re such a sweet cat now, aren’t you, Diana?’
The Persian cat puffed up with pride.
‘So, what shall we call him?’
‘We need to name the baby first.’
The family had to register a new baby’s name with the city hall within two weeks, and so Mr and Mrs Sakuraba had been discussing the matter of the baby’s name for quite a while. As the older boy’s name was Masahiro, the one thing they’d agreed on was that the new baby’s name should contain the same character, hiro.
Mr Sakuraba decided on the name Hiromi, while his wife, after much deliberation, wanted Kota – the ko being another reading of the character hiro. Neither would back down, and so finally they did paper-scissors-rock to reach a decision. Mr Sakuraba won.