"Who do you belong to?" "I'm Tama. I belong to the bath-house on the corner. Nice to meet you."

Jiro Osaragi

 

 

Some guys toss a cat into my house and leave. Thinking it was a poor thing, I adopted It and now I have 14 cats. Sometimes an anonymous letter asking a favor is attached to the cat, the hypocrisy of which makes me angry. One day I fixed a note with "Who do you belong to?" on it to a cat that often came to my garden. Next time the cat came, it had the note with a full response. "Manners of people living in this world should be like this," the novelist writes. From a collection of essays, "Spending Days With Cats."

 

November 27,  2017

from “Oriori no Kotoba” by Kiyokazu Washida, The Asahi Shimbun