experimental serialized fiction, collected in one volume and originally published in 1905-06 Japan.

I only got as far as page 22 (the start of the second chapter of 8) -- a hungry calico tortoiseshell stray finds a reluctant home with a struggling writer/artist in Ch. 1; in chapter 2 he appears to have gained some notoreity beyond his human's comprehension.

The introduction notes that the author was still figuring out the best format/length for his serialized essays for the first few installments/chapters, so you expect some unevenness in pacing, but it was pretty boring at this point. I think I've gotten as much out of it that I care to, though other readers (cat fanciers?) might enjoy it more. ( )

22

That's enough. The cat as narrator is great. But the satire on his master, a dense professor, fails to be winning.

A satire in the indirect literary style of that day. Probably of most interest to enthusiasts of Meiji period literature.

Originally, the first chapter of this book was a short story, but it proved so popular that Soseki was persuaded to write more chapters that collected created this novel.

The story is told to us by a cat, still unnamed. Observant, opinionated and often disconcerted by the behavior of humans, this cat perspective allows Sōseki to mock a variety of human weaknesses and society in general.

Looking for food and shelter, the narrator cat finds a particular house, whose owner, is an English teacher, Sneaze (the mistake is intentional). From the cat's perspective, the novel begins to focus more on the human world. The narrator observes his master and, to enter into the functioning of his mind, quotes some passages from Sneaze's diary, facilitating the insertion of human thoughts in the narrative. Much of the novel is a dialogue between the teacher's family and visitors to the home, and the cat gains more knowledge through familiarity.

There are several philosophical and literary discussions in the novel, showing us the intellectual life of the Meiji era (1868–1912), particularly the mixture of Western culture with Japanese traditions, to which the author is very critical.

The cat's own speech, full of grandiloquence and self-importance, should be viewed in an ironic way, since it is an ordinary domestic cat. Allegorical and satirical study of human nature and intellectual bankruptcy (from the author's perspective) of the modernization of Japan. ( )