After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Who gives a damn?
he thought. 
Let them 
spy on me all they want. I’m going to a seaside town in Chiba to see my father, who is 
suffering from dementia. He might remember his son, or then again he might not. His 
memory was already pretty shaky last time. It’s probably gotten worse since then. 
Cognitive disorders move ahead, never back. Or so I’ve been told. They’re like gears 
that can only move in one direction
. 
When the train left Tokyo Station, Tengo took out the paperback he had brought 
along and started reading it. It was an anthology of short stories on the theme of travel 
and included one tale about a young man who journeyed to a town ruled by cats. 
“Town of Cats” was the title. It was a fantastical piece by a German writer with whom 
he was not familiar. According to the book’s editorial note, the story had been written 
in the period between the two world wars. 
Carrying a single bag, the young man is traveling alone at his whim with no 
particular destination in mind. He goes by train and gets off at any stop that arouses 
his interest. He takes a room, sees the sights, and stays as long as he likes. When he 
has had enough, he boards another train. He spends every vacation this way. 
One day he sees a lovely river from the train window. Gentle green hills line the 
meandering stream, and below them lies a quiet-looking, pretty little town with an old 
stone bridge over the river. The scene attracts him. Tasty river fish should be 
available in a place like this. The train stops at the station, and the young man steps 
down with his bag. No one else gets off there. As soon as he alights, the train departs. 
No workers man the station, which must see very little activity. The young man 
crosses the stone bridge and walks into the town. It is utterly still, with no one to be 
seen. All the shops are shuttered, the town hall deserted. No one occupies the desk at 
the town’s only hotel. He rings the bell, but no one comes out. The place seems totally 
uninhabited. Perhaps all the people are off napping somewhere. But it is only ten 
thirty in the morning, way too early for that. Perhaps something caused all the people 
to abandon the town. In any case, the next train will not come until the following 
morning, so he has no choice but to spend the night here. He wanders around the town 
to kill time. 
In fact, however, this is a town of cats. When the sun starts to go down, many cats 
cross the bridge into town—cats of all different kinds and colors. They are much 
larger than ordinary cats, but they are still cats. The young man is shocked to see this 
spectacle. He rushes into the bell tower in the center of town and climbs to the top to 
hide. The cats go about their business raising the shop shutters or seating themselves 
at their town hall desks to start their day’s work. Soon, still more cats come, crossing 
the bridge into town like the others. They enter the shops to buy things or go to the 
town hall to handle administrative matters or have a meal at the hotel restaurant or 
drink beer at the tavern and sing lively cat songs. One plays a concertina and others 
dance to the music. Because cats can see in the dark, they need almost no lights, but 

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that particular night the glow of the full moon floods the town, enabling the young 
man to see every detail from his perch in the bell tower. When dawn approaches, the 
cats close up shop, finish their work or official business, and swarm back across the 
bridge to where they came from. 
By the time the sun comes up, the cats are gone, and the town is deserted again. 
The young man climbs down, picks one of the hotel beds for himself, and goes to 
sleep. When he gets hungry, he eats the bread and cooked fish left in the hotel 
kitchen. When darkness approaches, he hides in the top of the bell tower again and 
observes the cats’ activities until dawn. Trains stop at the station before noon and 
before evening. If he took the morning train he could continue his journey, and if he 
took the afternoon train he could go back where he came from. No passengers alight 
at the station, and no one boards here, either. Still, the trains stop at the station for 
exactly one minute as scheduled and pull out again. He could take one of the trains 
and leave the creepy cat town behind. But he doesn’t. Being young, he has a lively 
curiosity and boundless ambition and is ready for adventure. He wants to see more of 
the strange spectacle of the cat town. If possible, he wants to find out when and how it 
became a town of cats, how the town is organized, and what the cats are doing there. 
He is probably the only human being who has ever seen this strange sight. 
On the night of the third day, a hubbub breaks out in the square below the bell 
tower. “Hey, do you smell something human?” one of the cats says. “Now that you 
mention it, I 
thought
there was a funny smell the past few days,” another chimes in, 
twitching his nose. “Me too,” says yet another cat. “That’s weird. There shouldn’t be 
any humans here,” someone adds. “No, of course not. There’s no way a human could 
get into this town of cats.” “Still, that smell of theirs is definitely here.” 
The cats form into groups and search the town from top to bottom like vigilante 
bands. Cats have an excellent sense of smell when they want to use it, so it takes them 
very little time to discover that the bell tower is the source of the smell. The young 
man hears their soft paws padding their way up the stairs.