Cats have been prominent in Japanese literature since Natsume Soseki made his name with his debut I am a Cat. Tama, the cat, in Mieko Kannai’s novel Oh, Tama! (1987) (translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy) is the central force that drives the plot of the story. None of the eccentric characters would have met if Tama hadn’t needed a home. Idle freelance photographer Natsuyuki, with an obsession with the fictional photographer Amanda Anderson, is pressed into the duty of looking after the heavily pregnant Tama by his former fling Tsuneko’s half-brother Alexandre, a mixed-raced model and sometimes porn actor. Alexandre also moves in with Natsuyuki for short periods of time during the course of the novel. It seems that Tsuneko gets around and she has told all of her recent lovers that they each are the father of her unborn child to get money. Subsequently, she has gone on the lam and no one, even Alexandre, knows where she is. One of the prospective fathers, Fuyuhiko, a psychiatrist from Kyoto, turns out to be Natsuyuki’s abandoned half-brother. He arrives in Tokyo looking for Tsuneko and also decides to stay on at Natsuyuki’s apartment in the Meijiro neighborhood of Tokyo that bridges Takadanobaba and Ikebukuro. This neighbor hood acts as a sort of character as Kannai refers to specific places there and in the neighborhoods that border it. The story sort of meanders and the characters just interact and talk about various things such as Japanese and western writers, actors, artists, and directors among other things. Thus, aspect of the novel call to mind the writing of Haruki Murakami in the foreign culture references in particular, but there’s no magical realism her-it is all rather unexceptionally realistic. There are some bits that I think must have come across as more clever in the original Japanese; such as the conversation that the characters have about the difference between neko-inazu (poisoned food) and nezumi-inazu (strong cupboards that keep rats out). That being said, there’s voyeuristic feel to the novel, in which the readers can observe these idiosyncratic people. Furthermore, this novel doesn’t have a conventional ending. At the end of the novel both Alexandre and Fuyuhiko have returned to stay with Natsuyuki in Meijiro, and Tama has given birth to her kittens, all of which have found good homes. And I guess that can be seen as a happy ending.
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