The Travelling Cat Chronicles

3 ½ BETWEEN FRIENDS

A HUGE WHITE ship was docked beside the wharf of the harbour.

The mouth at the bow was open wide and Satoru told me that we were going to drive our van right into it. It swallowed up any number of cars into its belly and yet it didn’t sink. I must say, humans really do create some amazing things.

I mean, who in the world came up with the idea of floating a huge lump of iron on top of water? Must have had a couple of screws loose, whoever it was. It stands to reason that a heavy object will sink. No other animal in the world would try to defy the laws of nature, but humans are a very peculiar species.

Satoru hurried over to the ferry terminal to buy our ticket, but when he came back his face was all flushed.

‘I’m afraid we’ve got a problem. They won’t let you travel as a passenger like me, Nana.’

He explained that he had written my name on the passenger form.

When the official at the reception desk found out that Nana Miyawaki (age six) was a cat, he had a good laugh, apparently. Sometimes Satoru can be spectacularly dense.

‘Shall we get on board?’

A string of cars was already lined up and driving into the gaping mouth of the ferry, and I was starting to feel just a little bit anxious.

‘Nana, why is your tail all puffed up like that?’

Oh, come on. If, worst-case scenario, the ship does actually sink, we’ll be thrown overboard into the sea, won’t we? I don’t think I can imagine a fate more terrible.

I recalled the sea we’d visited when we were on our way back from Yoshimine the farmer’s, and how that vast expanse of water, the weighty crash of the waves, had made me feel. The thought of being flung straight into it made even an intrepid cat like me shiver. Cats are no good at swimming and detest the water (though there are a few exceptions; some cats actually like to have a bath, but these are just instances of spontaneous feline mutation).

Even Satoru would have great trouble swimming to shore with me perched on top of his head clinging on for dear life.

Despite my misgivings, the silver van entered the belly of the beast. Walking with his suitcase in his left hand and my basket in his right seemed to wear Satoru out. Not long ago, he could have carried both easily.

Maybe I should walk on my own?

I scratched at the lock of the basket from the inside, and Satoru told me to stop. He tilted the basket so the door was facing upwards. Whoa, I said, and slipped backwards on to my bottom.

‘Animals aren’t allowed loose on the ferry, so you’ll just have to be patient.’

By animals, this would include dogs, too, I assumed. Fair enough. There are plenty of hotels that allow pets in general but turn away cats. They complain that cats sharpen their claws on the furniture, and so on. But for guests with cats, all they need to do is add an extra fee to cover any repairs, right?

Plus, this animal smell that bothers humans is much less strong in cats than it is with dogs, am I right?

Even so, this dogs okay, cats not okay attitude is really offensive from a feline perspective. In that sense, it’s much easier to accept if neither cat nor dog is allowed. The upshot? I was liking this ferry.

Satoru took me to the pet room in the ship, where all the travelling animals were kept.

It was a spartan, neat room, and several spacious cages were stacked up to the ceiling. Today, there seemed to be a lot of passengers travelling with animals, for almost all ten of the cages were occupied. There was a white chinchilla, but that was the only other cat. The rest were a mix of dogs of varying sizes.

‘This is Nana. Please be nice to him until we arrive.’

Satoru went out of his way to greet the passengers already in the pet room, and put me into one of the cages.

‘Will you be okay, Nana? You won’t be too lonely?’

Lonely, surrounded by all these other dogs and a cat? Hardly! In fact, I’d prefer somewhere more peaceful. The dogs seemed to want to talk, and because there were so many of them, they were all yapping back and forth. And muttering complaints about me, like, Well, look at this, will you? A mongrel moggy that the human dragged in. Well, hey, sooorry!

‘I really wish we could have gone the whole way in the van. I’m sorry about that,’ Satoru said.

Not to worry. It’s only for a day, so I can put up with it. Cats might not seem it, but we are nothing if not patient.

On this trip, it seems like we’ll still have a long way to travel even after the ferry has docked. And Satoru gets tired easily these days.

‘I’ll come as often as I can to check on you, so if you get lonely, just hang in there.’

Any chance you can refrain from the over-protective comments in front of the others? You’re embarrassing me.

‘Hello there. I hope you two cats will get on.’

Satoru was peering into the cage just below mine, the one with the chinchilla in it. I was in my cage, so I couldn’t see, but since the moment we arrived it had been curled up in a corner.

‘This one seems lonely, too. Maybe he’s feeling afraid, with all the dogs around today.’

No, you guessed wrong. The curled-up chinchilla’s tail had been twitching all this time, and it was obvious to me that what he was feeling was annoyance and irritation at the dogs’ incessant chatter.

‘Okay, I’ll see you later, Nana.’

His suitcase in hand, Satoru left, closing the door carefully behind him.

And the dogs immediately tried to make conversation.

So – tell me – where ya from, and where ya headed? What kind of guy is your master? In an instant, I understood exactly how the chinchilla felt, curled up there in disgust, and I copied his way of dealing with it.

I was still curled up in the back of my cage, pretending to be asleep, when the door opened wide and in stepped Satoru.

‘I’m sorry, Nana. I guess you really are lonely in here.’

After that, he came back to check on me another ten times. With Satoru popping in and out more often than the other owners, before long the dogs started teasing me about it. Every time Satoru left the room, there would be a noisy chorus of Pampered! Pampered!

Knock it off, you hounds! I growled, and was about to curl up again in the back of the cage when the chinchilla, directly below me, addressed the room.

Carrying on like a bunch of brats – you chaps are really starting to annoy me. Don’t you understand? It’s his master who’s the lonely one?

For an expensive-looking long-haired breed, this cat had quite a mouth on him. The dogs all grumbled back, Yeah, but… You see, Nana’s master said Nana was lonely, didn’t he?

For dogs, you lot have a rubbish sense of smell. That master gives off a smell that says he’s not going to be around for long. So he wants to spend as much time as possible with his darling cat.

In an instant, the dogs had piped down. It’s too bad. The poor guy, they started to mumble in hushed voices. To tell you the truth, they weren’t very subtle about it. But I forgave them. They were all young dogs, and none too bright.

Thank you for that.

I aimed this at the invisible cage below me, and the chinchilla shot back with a sullen They were getting on my nerves, that’s all.

The next time Satoru appeared, the scolded hounds all wagged their tails enthusiastically at him. ‘Wow,’ Satoru said happily, ‘you guys really are happy to see me, aren’t you?’ and he reached in through the bars of one or two of the cages to stroke the occupants. Not the sharpest pencils in the box, these dogs, but I’d have to say they were pretty docile and decent types.

After this, we cats occasionally joined in the dogs’ idle chatter, and time passed by on our unremarkable sea voyage. Most of the time, though, we talked at cross purposes. We couldn’t fathom, for instance, why the dogs were so into snacks like canine chewing gum and other stuff.

At midday the following day, the ferry arrived safely at its destination – the island of Hokkaido. Satoru came to fetch me first thing.

‘I’m sorry, Nana. You must have been lonely.’

Not at all. I had a good chat with that barbed-tongued chinchilla. I was just thinking it would be great if I could say my goodbyes to him face to face, when Satoru turned my basket around so the open door was facing the room.

‘Nana, say goodbye to everyone.’

See you all, I said, and the hounds’ tails wagged in unison.

Guddo rakku!

This from the chinchilla, in some language I didn’t understand.

Guddo… what?

It means ‘good luck’. My master often says it.

Come to think of it, the chinchilla’s master, a foreigner with a Japanese wife, had come to see him during the journey. The cat had learned human language mainly from Japanese people, but apparently understood a lot of what his master said, too.

Thanks. Guddo rakku to you, too.

We bid farewell to the pet room, made our way down to the car deck and climbed into our silver van.

When we emerged from the mouth of the ferry, we were greeted by wall-to-wall blue sky.

‘Hokkaido, at last, Nana.’

The land was flat and sprawling. Outside the window was what looked like an ordinary city, but everything seemed much more spread out. The roads, for instance, were far wider than those around Tokyo.

We drove for a while before reaching the suburbs. There wasn’t much traffic, and we enjoyed a leisurely drive, listening to upbeat music as we went.

The road was bordered with a lovely profusion of purple and yellow wildflowers.

You could just leave the roads in Hokkaido as they were and they’d look pretty gorgeous. Not at all like the roads in Tokyo, which are surrounded by endless concrete and asphalt. Even in the more built-up areas here, the hard shoulders are all dirt. Because of that, perhaps, it’s easy for the soil to breathe and the flowers to thrive. The scenery was very soothing.

‘The yellow ones are called goldenrods, but I don’t know about the purple ones.’

The flowers had caught Satoru’s eye, too. The jumble of colours was that striking. The purple wasn’t one block of colour but various gradations from light to dark.

‘What do you say we stop for a bit?’

Satoru pulled over in a layby. I got out, with Satoru carrying me. An occasional car passed by, so he held me safely in his arms and wouldn’t let me down as he climbed up to the purple flowers.

‘They might be wild chrysanthemums. I had imagined them to be a bit neater and tidier, though…’

The wildflowers pushing up vigorously from the soil had stems covered with blooms, like an upside-down broom. Not at all what you’d call graceful; more forceful and vigorous than that.

Oh!

As soon as I spotted it, I reached out my paw. A honeybee was buzzing among the flowers.

‘Careful, Nana. You might get stung.’

Hey, what are you going to do? It’s instinct. I clawed at the bee and Satoru brought my paws together in his hand and held them there.

Damn it. It’s exciting to play with the insects flying around. Let me go, I said, straightening my legs against his arms to get free, but Satoru held me tight and put me back in the van.

‘If you just caught them, that would be fine, but I know you’ll eat them, too. And we can’t have you getting stung inside your mouth.’

Well, you catch something, you’ve got to take a bite out of it. Back in Tokyo, when I killed cockroaches I’d always take a bite. The hard wings were like cellophane so I didn’t eat those, but the flesh was soft and savoury.

Every time Satoru found the remains of a cockroach I’d left, he’d scream. I don’t understand why humans have such an aversion to them. Structurally, they’re not so different from kabutomushi and drone beetles, the kind kids collect as pets. If it was one of those beetles, you can bet he wouldn’t scream like that. But from a feline point of view, their speed makes them both challenging and fun to catch.

We continued our drive along a river, then down a hill, and emerged on a road that ran alongside the sea.

Waa—

‘Wow.’

We both shouted out at almost the same instant.

‘It looks just like the sea.’

He was talking about the pampas grass which spread out along both sides of the road. Its white ears covered the flat, sprawling fields from one end to the other, and swayed in the wind like white, cresting waves.

It hadn’t been long since we last stopped, but Satoru pulled over again.

Even though there were so few cars on the road, Satoru came around to the passenger side and carried me out. He must have been afraid I might leap out. A little over-protective, I thought, but if that makes him feel better, I’m happy to let him take charge. Satoru had big hands and I felt secure and calm whenever he held me.

I wanted to see this scenery from a slightly higher vantage point, so I slipped from his hands on to his shoulder and stretched my neck. I was now just at Satoru’s eye level.

The wind was rustling, the ears of the pampas grass swaying. The waves were rolling further than the eye could see.

It was just as Satoru had said. This was like a sea on land. Unlike the sea, though, there was no heavy booming sound. In this kind of sea, I might be able to swim.

From his shoulder, I leapt down to the ground and nosed my way into the pampas grass.

The path before me was blocked by the thick stems. I lifted my head and saw, far above me, the white ears waving against a clear blue sky.

‘Nana?’

Satoru’s worried voice reached my ears.

‘Nana, where are you-uuu?’

There was the sound of dry grass being trampled so I knew that Satoru had entered the pampas grass sea, too. I’m here, just here, just near you.

But as he called me, Satoru’s voice drifted further away. From where I was, I could see Satoru, but he couldn’t see me, hidden as I was by the pampas.

I guess I have no choice, I thought, and followed quickly after Satoru so he wouldn’t get lost.

‘Nana?’

Right here! I answered him, but it seemed like my voice was being carried away by the wind and didn’t reach him.

‘Naaaaana!’

Satoru began to sound desperate.

‘Nana! Nana, where are you-uuuuu?’

Satoru started to call out into the distance and, unable to bear it, I let out a loud shout, as big as I could make it.

I’m right heeeere!

And then there he was, framed against the sky, gazing down at me. The instant our eyes met, his stern look melted. His eyes softened and light caught the trails of water sliding down his cheeks.

Without a word, he knelt down on the earth, placed his big hands around my middle and hugged me. That hurts! My guts are going to squeeze out.

‘You silly thing! If you wander off in here, I’ll never be able to find you!’

Satoru’s whole body shook with his sobs.

‘For someone your size, this field is like a sea of trees!’

A ‘sea of trees’ is how Satoru had described it to me earlier. Inside a forest like that, internal compasses don’t function and you totally lose your way.

You’re the silly one. I’d never wander so far that I’d actually lose you.

‘Don’t leave me… Stay with me.’

Ah-hah! Finally.

Finally, he had said what he really meant.

I’d known for a long time how Satoru felt.

I knew he was searching hard for a new owner for me, but that as each attempt came to nothing, he felt hugely relieved to be taking me home again.

‘It’s such a shame I can’t leave him here,’ he’d tell each of his friends, but in the van on the way home he’d be all smiles. How could I ever leave him, having experienced that kind of love?

I will never, ever, leave him.

As Satoru wept silent tears, I licked his hand over and over, my rough tongue wandering over every knuckle and crevice.

It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. I realized how much Hachi would have regretted it – being separated from a child who loved him so much.

But Satoru was no longer a child. And I’m a former stray. So this time we should be able to make things work out.

Okay, let’s get back on the road! This is our final journey.

On this last trip, let’s see all sorts of wonderful things. Let’s make a pledge to take in as many amazing sights as we can.

My seven-shaped crooked tail should be able to snag every single marvellous thing we pass.

Back in the van and driving off, the doves-about-to-appear CD came to an end. Then a woman’s low, husky voice started to sing strangely and in a foreign-sounding language I couldn’t understand.

The doves-about-to-appear song was one his mother liked, apparently, while his father preferred this one, with the husky-voiced woman singing.

The road was lined as far as the eye could see with those purple and yellow flowers.

We continued driving at a leisurely pace. Hmm… when was the last time we had to stop at a traffic light?

We were no longer by the seaside but heading inland, and sturdy-looking wilderness spread out on either side. Finally, we could see cultivated, rolling hills.

I was in awe of this land, so flat and magnificent. It was like nothing I’d ever seen.

Wooden fences lined the roads now, and in the plots behind them there were – well, I wasn’t at all sure what they were. Large animals, noses to the ground, chomping away at the grass. What the hell were those things?

I put my paws up and pressed them against the passenger window, stretching up as far as I could. I often did that to check out the scenery outside, so Satoru had made a seat for me out of a large box with a cushion placed on top. Whenever I saw something that piqued my interest, I’d always lean forward like this.

‘Ah, those are horses. This area is all pasture.’

Horses? Those things? I’d seen them on TV, but this was my first time seeing the real thing. On TV, they looked much bigger. The horses chewing grass along the road were certainly large, but they were also relatively slender.

I craned my neck around to take a last look back at the horses as we passed, and Satoru laughed.

‘If you like them that much, let’s park up for a closer look next time we see some.’

In the next pasture we came to, the horses were in an enclosure quite a long way from the road.

‘It’s a little far away,’ Satoru said ruefully as he got out of the van, walked around to my side and picked me up.

When he slammed the van door shut, the horses, so distant they appeared smaller than Satoru’s hands, stopped chewing grass and raised their long heads to look at us.

There was a tense moment. The horses’ ears pricked up as they appraised us.

‘Look, they’re watching us, Nana.’

Not just watching, but carefully checking us out. They wanted to see if we were a danger to them. If we had been close enough for them to realize we were just a human and a cat, they would have been relieved.

Given their size, I didn’t think they needed to worry. But animals have an instinct. Whatever their size, horses are grass eaters, and grass eaters have a long history of being hunted by meat eaters. This makes them timid and skittish.

On the other hand, we cats may be small, but we’re hunters. And hunters are fighters. We’re on our guard, too, with creatures we don’t know, but when it comes to a fight we’re more than willing to face up to animals much bigger than us.

That’s why when dogs meddle with cats for fun, they end up whimpering, their tails between their legs. A dog ten times our size? Bring it on!

In my view, dogs have long since given up hunting. Even hunting dogs just chase their prey for the sake of their master these days, and they don’t finish it off themselves. That’s the crucial difference between them and us cats; even if we’re just hunting a bug, we’re intent on making the kill ourselves.

This point about killing prey is a major divide between various animals. Horses are certainly dozens of times bigger than me, but they don’t scare me.

A sense of pride suddenly swelled up in me. Pride in myself as a cat who still hadn’t lost his identity as a hunter.

And for me, as a hunter, I can tell you that I’m not going to back away from what lies ahead for Satoru.

The horses stared at us for a while, then concluded perhaps that we weren’t an immediate threat and returned to chomping on the grass.

‘They’re a bit far away, but I wonder if I could get a photo of them with my mobile phone.’

Satoru took his phone out of his pocket. Most of the photos he took with it, by the bye, were of me.

But I don’t think you should take one of those horses, I thought.

When Satoru held the camera out towards them, the horses’ heads popped up again. And their ears shot up, too.

They stood there, stock-still, gazing at us until Satoru had taken the photo.

‘Yeah, they’re definitely too far away.’

He gave up and put the phone away. The horses continued to stare silently.

They gazed at us right up to the moment we were back in the van and the doors were shut, before finally swinging lazily back to their meal. Apologies, my friends. Sorry to bother you, I called out.

I suppose there are animals who live like this, even though they could easily kick me, and Satoru, from here to the far end of Hokkaido.

If it is their instinct that makes them that way, then I’m glad I’m a cat and have the instinct to put up a fight. I’m happy to be a high-spirited, adventurous cat that will never be intimidated by other animals, even if they’re bigger than me.

I’ve made my point, but just to reconfirm this: meeting those horses meant a lot to me.

On the drive, I saw even more lovely scenery for the first time.

White birches with pale trunks, mountain ash with red clusters of berries like bells.

Satoru told me what everything was called. And that the mountain-ash berries are bright red. I remember some expert on TV saying once, ‘Cats have a hard time distinguishing the colour red.’

‘Wow! Would you look at how red those berries are!’ Satoru called out, and that’s how I learned about the colour red. It no doubt appeared differently to Satoru, but I learned how what Satoru called red appeared to me.

‘The ones over there aren’t so red yet.’

Every time he saw trees through the window, Satoru would talk to me about them. So I became quite skilled at discriminating between different shades of red. I just learned to distinguish, in my own way of seeing things, the variations of red that Satoru pointed out, but also that they did all indeed share the same colour. For the rest of my life, I would remember all the shades of red Satoru mentioned that day.

We saw fields, too, of potatoes and pumpkins being harvested, and fields where the harvest was over.

The harvested potatoes were stuffed into bags so huge they looked like they could hold several people, and the bags were then piled up in a corner of the field. Large pyramids of pumpkins were stacked up on top of the black, damp soil.

And here and there on the gentle hills were gigantic black or white plastic bundles. I was wondering why someone had left these toys behind, but they turned out to hold cut grass.

‘They have a lot of snow in the winter here, so before it falls they have to harvest the grass so their cows and horses will have enough to eat.’

Snow – I’ve seen some of that white stuff falling in Tokyo. It melted pretty swiftly, though, so it was nothing to get worked up about. That’s what I was thinking at the time. But once winter arrived, I began to realize, the snow here would be a whole other story. Whenever there was a snowstorm and you couldn’t see anything in front of you, even I, strong as I am, would be tossed mercilessly into the air. But that’s a tale for another time.

Countryside snow that piles up to the eaves, versus city snow that melts away in a few days. It made me wonder, honestly, how they could both go by the same name.

As we drove on, taking the occasional break at a small supermarket, the scenery became more mountainous. Finally, the sun began to set.

We crossed a mountain pass as it did so, and another town came into view. As the silver van drove on, the sky fell darker by the moment, as if playing tag with the night.

‘It’s too late today. And we can’t buy any flowers,’ murmured Satoru, sounding put out, though still he didn’t head straight for our hotel but turned off the main road.

We continued down a minor road until we reached the end of the town, where we climbed a gentle hill. At the top was a wrought-iron gate. We drove straight through it.

The land here stretched out in all directions. It was neatly partitioned into squares, and in each square was a line of square stones. I knew what they were because I’d seen them on TV.

They were graves.

Apparently, humans like to have large stones put on top of them when they are dead. I remember thinking, as I watched a programme on TV about it, that it was a strange custom. The people on the programme were discussing how expensive graves were, and so on.

When an animal’s life is over, it rests where it falls, and it often seems to me that humans are such worriers, to think of preparing a place for people to sleep when they are dead. If you have to consider what’s going to happen after you die, life becomes doubly troublesome.

Satoru drove the van through this huge area as if he knew exactly where he was heading, and at last came to a halt somewhere in the centre of it all.

We got out, and Satoru walked slowly among the graves. After a while, he came to a halt in front of a grave with a whitish stone.

‘This is my father and mother’s grave.’

It was the final spot that Satoru had been so longing to visit.

I don’t get why humans like to have a huge stone put on top of them when they kick the bucket. But I do understand why they might want to look after a splendid stone like this.

I got the sense that the long drive was becoming too much for Satoru, but still, he had made it, in his silver van, with me by his side, his cat with the number-eight markings and the crooked tail like a seven.

Cats are not so heartless that they can’t respect those sorts of emotions.

‘I wanted to pay my respects with you here, Nana.’

I know, I said, rubbing my forehead vigorously along the edge of his parents’ gravestone.

It’s a great honour to meet you. Hachi was a wonderful cat, I’m sure, but don’t you think I’m rather nice, too?

‘I’m sorry. I was in a hurry, so I’ll bring flowers tomorrow,’ Satoru said, squatting down at the grave. There were some slightly wilted flowers in a vase.

‘Ah, I see,’ Satoru murmured. ‘It was Higan recently, the time of year when people visit graves… My aunt must have come.’

Satoru tenderly stroked the wilting petals.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come here much. I should have visited you more often.’

I stepped away from the grave, to give Satoru some time alone. If I disappeared completely from sight, I knew he would become anxious, so I lingered where he could see me.

During the five years I’d lived with Satoru, he’d left home only a couple of times to visit this grave.

‘Someday, I’ll take you with me, Nana,’ he had said. ‘You look just like Hachi, and my father and mother will be so surprised.

‘Someday,’ he had promised me, ‘we’ll go on a long trip together.’ And now it was happening.

‘Nana, come here!’ Satoru called me and put me on his lap. As he stroked me gently, running his wide hand across my whole body over and over, I wondered what he was talking about so silently with his parents.

This town was Satoru’s mother’s hometown, it seemed. His grandfather and grandmother, who were farmers, had passed away fairly young, and Satoru’s mother and his aunt hadn’t been able to keep up the farm, so they let it go. His mother had apparently regretted this for the rest of her life.

Especially after Satoru became part of their family.

A hometown where the only thing left is a grave has to be a bit sad for a child. But there were only a few relatives on Satoru’s mother’s side, and they had all moved away, so what could you do?

There are so many things in life that are beyond our control.

Satoru finally straightened his legs, enveloping me tightly in his arms.

‘We’ll be back tomorrow,’ he said, then turned to the van. We drove in silence through the now completely dark town towards our lodgings for the night.

We were staying in a cosy hotel that had a few rooms reserved for humans who had pets with them. It was a very sensible little place, I must say.

Satoru must have been exhausted from all the driving, because he went out once to get something to eat but came back within the hour and fell heavily on to the bed and into a deep sleep.

The next morning, though, he got up early.

He swiftly packed his bags, and when we emerged from the hotel the sun was still just coming up.

‘Darn, the florist’s isn’t open yet.’

Satoru made one circuit of the area in front of the station and seemed at a loss.

‘Maybe somewhere will be open on the way to the cemetery…’

He’d sort of jumped the gun starting off so early, with the flower shop still closed. On the way, he pulled up at the side of the road.

‘Guess we’ll have to make do with these.’

And the flowers he started picking were the purple and yellow flowers that had decorated the road we had been driving on the previous day.

I liked them! They were much more beautiful than any you’d buy in a shop, and Satoru’s father and mother would be thrilled to be given them.

I searched out some wild chrysanthemums with open blooms and showed him. ‘So you’re looking for flowers, too, eh?’ He laughed and plucked the very ones I’d been rustling around in for him.

He gathered an armful and we continued on to the cemetery.

It had been dark yesterday, so I hadn’t noticed, but from the top of the hill you could see the town in the distance. All the way to where the urban landscape became countryside.

The cemetery had a much more cheerful feeling in the early morning than it had the previous night, though, come to think of it, even when we’d visited in the dark yesterday, I hadn’t felt at all frightened. One associates graves and temples with ghost stories, but this place had none of that gloominess, or any sense that a resentful spirit might appear at any moment.

You ask if we cats can see ghosts. Don’t you know that there are things in this world that are better left a mystery?

Satoru, with flowers and garden tools (he must have bought these last night) in his arms, got out of the van.

After cleaning the gravestone, he took the wilting flowers from the vase, changed the water and replaced them with the new ones he’d just picked, their colours bright and festive.

The vase was overflowing now, and half the flowers were left over. ‘I’ll use these later,’ he said, and wrapped them in some damp newspaper and put them in the back of the van.

Satoru unwrapped the buns and cakes he’d bought and left these as offerings at the grave. Ants would no doubt soon swarm over them, and crows and weasels would come and whisk them away, but it was better than leaving them to rot.

Satoru then lit some incense at the grave. Apparently, in his family, it was the custom to light a whole bundle at once. I found it a bit too smoky, and slunk upwind to escape it.

Satoru sat down by the grave and gazed at it for a long time. Claws in and tucking my two front paws beneath my chest, I snuggled up on his knees, and he beamed at me and tickled under my chin with his fingertips.

‘I’m glad I could bring you, Nana,’ he whispered in a small voice that was barely audible.

He sounded really happy.

I stepped away from Satoru and took a stroll nearby, staying close so he could still see me. Below the low hedge that bordered the site, stringy butterburs grew.

And below those a cricket or something was leaping around. I sniffed around in them until Satoru came over.

‘What’s up, Nana? You’ve burrowed pretty deeply into those butterburs.’

Well, the thing is, underneath here is…

‘Something’s in there?’

Yeah, something very nimble indeed. It was just a quick glimpse, but I saw it jump. And it left behind a strange smell.

I kept sniffing below the butterbur leaves, and Satoru laughed.

‘It might be a Korobokkuru.’

Come again?

‘Tiny people that live under the butterbur leaves.’

What? That’s news to me. Are there really weird creatures like that in the world?

‘They were in a picture book I loved as a child.’

Ah – it’s just a story.

‘My parents loved that story, too. As I recall, they were both really excited when I was able to read that book by myself.’

Satoru told me all kinds of things about those tiny people, but since it was all, from a feline point of view, less than enthralling, I yawned deeply, showing my pointed teeth, and Satoru smiled.

‘I suppose you’re not very interested.’

What can I tell you? Cats are realists.

‘But if you do happen to see one, don’t catch it, okay?’

Okay, okay. Message received. If they really are there, I’d be itching to grab them, but out of deference to you, Satoru, I’ll hold back.

Satoru sat down in front of the grave one more time. Then at last he stood up, and said, ‘See you later.’ He looked calm and refreshed, as if he had done what he had come to do.

We drove off again and before long Satoru was pulling up at another grave.

‘My grandfather and grandmother.’

He placed all the leftover flowers at this grave and, as before, he unwrapped some buns and cakes and left them as offerings, then burned some incense.

‘All right. Let’s hit the road.’

The next destination was Sapporo, where his aunt lived.

The silver van was heading off on its final journey.

It happened as we were driving down a fairly nondescript stretch of road.

The road cut through a hill which sloped steeply on either side. Rows of white birches covered the embankments. From halfway down the trunks of the birches, the ground was covered with thick, striped bamboo.

In Hokkaido, this was entirely ordinary, nothing-special scenery.

We were driving along when suddenly Satoru gave a little yelp and braked to an abrupt stop. The sudden halt made me lurch forward and I pressed my claws into my cushion to steady myself.

Hey, what is going on?

‘Nana, look over there!’

I turned to look out of the window in the direction of his pointing finger. And whoa, talk about surprising!

Two large deer, and a smaller one, with spots on their backs. Probably parents and child. With the pattern on their backs, they blended in with the undergrowth. Pretty darn good camouflage.

‘I didn’t notice them at first, but then one of them moved.’

This particular deer had a puffy white heart-shaped bottom.

‘Shall I roll down the window?’

Satoru leaned over to the passenger side, pushed the button and the window began to open with a mechanical whir. And with that, the deer family turned in unison in our direction.

There was tension in the air.

Ah – I get it. These animals are similar to those horses. If you were to divide animals into those two categories, they’re the hunted.

‘I must have put them on their guard.’

Satoru stopped the window and watched their reaction. All three deer were staring at us steadily, then the two parents began to lope away up the hill.

The young deer, left behind, held our gaze, its sense of wariness still not fully developed.

His parents, apparently exasperated, seemed to call down to him from the top of the embankment, and the young deer, flashing its white heart-shaped little rear end at us, bounded up the slope.

‘Ah, it’s gone…’

Satoru stared regretfully after it.

‘But that was amazing. I’ve never seen deer like that beside the road.’

It’s got to be thanks to my tail. Just you wait – my crooked, seven-shaped tail is bound to snag lots more wonderful things.

And the perfect example of this came not long after we had watched the deer disappear.

The scenery was, typically, nothing special for Hokkaido. Gentle hills with softly wooded areas running into one another.

Just as we were heading into a thin layer of grey cloud, it started to rain. The kind of rain you see on a sunny day, just a light scattering of drops.

‘That’s really something. That’s the exact boundary where the rain begins.’

Satoru drove on, happy, but most cats find rain very depressing. I hoped it would stop soon, and, amazingly, it did start to let up and the sun fought its way through the clouds.

In the driver’s seat, Satoru gave a massive gulp. I was napping and twitched my ears at the sound. He braked gradually before pulling over to the side of the road.

In the sky above a hill before us was a vivid rainbow.

One end of the rainbow was rooted in the hill. We followed that arc with our eyes and found the other end rooted in the opposite hill.

I’d never seen the end of a rainbow in my entire life. And Satoru hadn’t either, I gathered, the way he was holding his breath.

We were both seeing something extraordinary together for the first time in our lives.

‘Shall we get out?’

Gingerly, Satoru got out of the car, as though he was afraid any sudden move would disturb the rainbow.

With both hands, fingers widened, he lifted me up out of the passenger seat, and the two of us gazed upwards.

The rainbow’s two ends were firmly anchored in the ground. The top was a little fainter, but the rainbow was entirely whole. It made a perfect arch.

I’d seen these colours somewhere before. I thought about it, and then it dawned on me.

The flowers at the graveyard that morning. The wild purple chrysanthemums, the colour of each slightly different, the bright-yellow goldenrod, and the cosmos.

Cover that bouquet of flowers with some light-coloured gauze and it would be just like a rainbow.

‘We offered a rainbow, didn’t we, at the grave?’

It made me happy when I heard Satoru say this. The two of us were on exactly the same wavelength.

Instead of getting all puffed up about it, I threw my head back and looked directly upwards, and saw one more extraordinary sight.

I gave a long meow, and Satoru looked up to see what had caught my attention.

Above the perfect arc of the rainbow was another – faint, but still continuous – rainbow.

Satoru gulped again. ‘Isn’t it amazing,’ he said again, this time his voice a little husky.

To think that we’d see this kind of thing at the end of our journey.

Satoru and I would remember this rainbow for the rest of our lives.

We stood there for a long time, until the weather cleared and the rainbow evaporated into the sky.

This was our final journey.

On our last journey, let’s see all kinds of amazing things. Let’s spend our time taking in as many wonderful sights as we can. That’s what I had pledged yesterday, when we set off.

And what incredible sights we saw.

Shortly afterwards, we arrived in Sapporo, and our journey drew to an end.