Contents
People in the Story
Setting of the Story
Chapter 1 At the crossroads
Chapter 2 Kittens like steam clouds
Chapter 3 Points and counterpoints
Chapter 4 The end of the debate
People in the story
Tama – the narrator of the story, a Siamese Flame Point cat
Nozomi Strayton – a girl about 10 years old
Ojiji or Jiji – What Tama call’s Nozomi’s father. His real name is Dean Strayton.
Setting of the story
This story is set in old Kannawa, an onsen district of Beppu, Japan. This area is known for its many hot spring resorts. The stone-paved alleyways of this district are filled with steam that is streaming from vents under the ground. The Jigoku Mushi Kobou is a geothermal steam-cooking workshop, where local foods are cooked with steam. This area is also known for its many friendly, local cats.
Chapter 1 At the crossroads
This is the story of my previous life. Before becoming Kinako, I was called Tama—a pretty typical name for a Japanese cat-—and my last day as Tama started with a struggle as bloody Jiji pounced on me and put me in my bamboo pet carrier. It was always Jiji who put me in there, and when he did, it meant I was going to the animal hospital. The first time he took me to the animal doctor, the lady stabbed me with sharp needles! We didn’t go to the animal hospital, though. Jiji and his daughter, my sweet Nozomi, took me to lunch with them at the old Kannawa Jigoku Mushi Koubou.
The mushi koubou was at the heart of old Kannawa’s charming stone streets and was an old steam vent cooking workshop. The front entrance was near the crossroads of the Kannawa Bus Station. It was an unseasonably sunny day in May and was just warm enough to sit outside. Ojiji and Nozomi sat at the table outside the building, eating steamed crab, sweet-potatoes, and lotus roots.
Ojiji was planning to take us on a bus ride after lunch. The bus would be arriving in 40 minutes and would make a brief stop before leaving for Beppu Station. I listened to their conversation as if I were a fly on the wall. In reality, I was just a cat in a cage.
“What should we drink?” Nozomi asked. She had taken off her knitted cap and stuffed it in her pocket.
Avenir Light is a clean and stylish font favored by designers. It's easy on the eyes and a great go-to font for titles, paragraphs & more.
“Let’s have wheat tea, Daddy!” said Nozomi.
At first, the waitress looked at the British man, but then shifted to Nozomi, who spoke Japanese. “Mugicha, futatsu, kudasai” she said.
“Would you like small or large?” the server asked in Japanese.
“One large and one small, please,” Nozomi clarified.
Chapter 2 Kittens like steam clouds
The woman brought two glasses of tea and set them next to the plate of steaming crab and potatoes. Nozomi was looking off into the distance. The puffs of steam were white against the dark brown wooden walls of the old building and then dissipated into the sky.
“I saw Hello Kitty in the steam clouds, Daddy,” Nozomi said. I responded by purring contentedly.
“I didn’t notice,” Ojiji said as he drank his tea.
“No, you wouldn’t. Why are you always so grumpy these days, Dad?”
At this point, I should tell you that I knew Ojiji had good reason to be grumpy. He was trying to raise Nozomi by himself. Although I had never met her, sometimes he talks about Saki, his mate. He says sadly that they loved laughing and drinking sake at the beach. But Jiji wasn’t with Saki that day. And now sake isn’t strong enough.
It’s funny that Ojiji doesn’t see the limitations of their ocean-loving, party-spirit. He prays for her to visit, if only in their dreams, to heal their souls if even just a little. Sometimes at night, I visit the river, and I ask the river spirit to hear Ojiji’s prayer and bring Saki back to him and Nozomi. I am trying to be a good spirit-guide, but being a maneki-neko in the spirit world is rather new to me.
“I can’t keep my head in the clouds, Nozomi” the man said.
Nozomi looked at me in the pet carrier. “No, you are grumpy, Dad. Tama and I can both see Hello Kitty, so why can’t you?”
“Nozomi, I have something to tell you. Tama won’t be keeping any of her kittens,” said Jiji.
“What do you mean, Dad?”
The man motioned for the waitress. The woman came out from inside the restaurant. “Mugijyanakute, nikaidonegai shimasu.” Jiji was trying to change his order from tea to shochu. The waitress looked confused, and again looked to the girl.
“Kare wa, mugicha no kawari ni shouchu mizuwari onegaishimasu,” said Nozomi.
“Yes, please,” said Jiji.
“Daddy, it’s kind of early for shochu. That stuff tastes bad, and you should set a good example for me and Tama.”
“Well, Tama shouldn’t have been allowed to go outside overnight,” he said. “And now her condition has given me more than I can handle.”
“You can handle this, Dad. I am so excited to help. And after the ultrasound today, we will know how many kittens Tama is going to have!”
“Alright, that’s enough, Nozomi,” he said. “I’ve changed my mind. We aren’t going for an ultrasound.”
“What? What do you mean?” asked Nozomi.
“I mean that we are going to ask the doctor to end Tama’s pregnancy,” said Jiji.
Just then, I meowed annoyingly to give Jiji a piece of my mind. I wanted to raise my kittens. This situation was just so depressing.
“She understands, you know. She doesn’t like your idea either.” Nozomi’s heart sank. Her eyes diverted back to the clouds and welled up with tears. “Dad, I don’t want you to take Tama to the vet today,” she said. The girl continued to look across at the steam vents. “The steam looks lovely,” she said. “I didn’t really see Hello Kitty. I just saw the shape in the clouds against the building.”
Chapter 3 Points and counterpoints
“Are you going to eat that last lotus root?” Jiji asked.
“No. go ahead.” Just then an unusually warm wind blew against the building.
“The shochu’s really smooth,” Jiji said.
“I think I need a shot too, Dad, if it helps the pain go away,” Nozomi replied. Her father looked at her unamused.
“It's really an awfully simple operation, Nozomi,” Jiji said. “It's not really an operation at all.”
The girl glanced at me in the pet carrier under the table. I waved with my paw.
“I know Tama wouldn't mind it, Nozomi. It's really not anything. Kannawa already has so many cats, and kittens are a lot of work to clean up after and find homes for. Would you give up our travels over school breaks? We are never here.”
“Mom would never agree to this.”
“If your mom was here, yes, everything would be different. But she’s not.”
Sometimes when I am sitting alone with Nozomi, she tells me about her mother, and how badly she misses her. She said that her mother worked hard that morning to prepare bentos for Nozomi and Ojiji, and then went to work herself. After work, she liked to walk on the beach and collect shells before coming home. It was her mom’s self-care. That was the afternoon that the earth shook and the waves came in Tohoku. They never did find Saki. Ojiji and Nozomi evacuated to Beppu for a fresh start. I was part of that new start. Poor Nozomi, if she could only express her sorrow completely.
“I miss mom.”
“I know you do. So do I. Listen. They’ll just shave some of Tama’s fur and sew her up and then it's all perfectly safe. We’ll go with her and stay with her the whole time.”
“A cat-abortion? Really, Dad? That isn’t even a thing!” snapped Nozomi.
“It is a thing. And we'll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.”
“I don’t think so, Dad! That will make us so unhappy.” Nozomi reached down and opened the cage. I was laying sideways to stay comfortable, as I was already starting to feel heavy from the kittens growing inside of me. She pulled me out and said, “I think Tama would like to see her kittens, Daddy.”
“It’s not an option, Nozomi. Most cats like being alone.”
“Most mama cats like to play with their own kittens, Dad,” she said. Seriously, where did he get the idea that cats like being alone? I wake him up literally every night, pawing his face, knocking the remote control onto the floor. All so that he will open the front door and let me out, so I can hang out with my friends.
“Well,” Jiji said, “are you ready to clean litter boxes every day and pay hundreds of thousands of yen on veterinary bills and cat food? Before Tama was pregnant, everything was so simple. She is a sweet cat, and I just like things the way they were.”
“You want to rob me of watching Tama giving birth to kittens and nursing them, even though you know how much joy it would bring to our hearts?” asked Nozomi.
“Come on, Nozomi. Look at all the stray cats in Kannawa. We need to do what’s right.”
“You should have thought of that and gotten her fixed a long time ago, Dad.”
“Yes, we should have. But we didn’t, so here we are.”
“If you loved me, you wouldn’t take Tama’s kittens away from her—away from me.”
“I love you. I love Tama, too, but I just can't handle the stress. You know how I get when I worry. I worry about the house. Our landlord doesn’t allow cats, Nozomi, and we already have Tama.”
You of little faith, I thought. Why are you so afraid?
“So if we take Tama to the vet, you won’t worry?”
“I won't worry because it's perfectly simple,” said Jiji.
“Then we’ll go. Because I don't care about Tama.”
I knew she didn’t mean it, but OUCH, I’m sitting right here!
“What do you mean?” said Jiji.
“I don't care about Tama anyways.”
I wished she would quit saying that.
“Well, I care about Tama,” he said.
“Oh, yes. But I don't care about her. And I'll let you take Tama and kill her kittens, and then everything will be fine,” Nozomi blurted.
I was horrified to hear such hopeless words coming out of Nozomi’s mouth.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be, Nozomi.”
Chapter 4 The end of the debate
Steaming mad, Nozomi set me on her chair, stood up and walked to the footbaths next to where we were. Across, on the other side were stone pathways leading to various Japanese inns and hot springs for which Beppu is famous.
The path below mushi koubou led into the maze-like alleyways of Kannawa. The shadow of a cloud moved across the paving stones.
“We could have all this,” she said. “We could have everything and kittens, and now you are making it impossible.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we could have kittens and everything.”
“We can have everything if we go to the vet today,” he countered.
“No, we can’t. And once they take them away, we’ll never get them back.”
“But at least we’ll still have Tama,” said Jiji.
“We’ll wait and see.”
“Come on back to the table,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.”
“I don’t feel any way,” she said. “But I know you are a bad Dad.”
“I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do,” he said.
“Or that Tama doesn’t want to do, right?”
“All right, but you’ve got to understand.”
“I understand,” Nozomi said. “Are you serious, Dad? You are seriously going to make Tama have an abortion?”
The man sat down at the table, and just then Nozomi’s eyes met mine, and I meowed again. I glanced furtively at Nozomi, and then at the pathways between the buildings. I am so grateful that she and I can communicate with just paws, meows, and eye contact.
“You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I am only doing this for our own good, and for Tama’s good. If we don’t take her in, before you know it, we will have 30 cats in our house.”
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you? Doesn’t she mean anything to you? We could get along.”
“Of course she does. But I want to keep our life simple, and this is perfectly simple.”
“Right, it’s perfectly simple!” Nozomi said sarcastically.
“I understand you are feeling frustrated, but Tama will be fine.”
“Would you do something for me, Dad?”
“I’d do anything for you.”
“CHANGE YOUR MIND!”
He looked briefly at me sitting on the chair. “Fine, we will become crazy cat people.”
It seems that sarcasm runs in the family.
“Really?” Nozomi said.
“No, of course not.”
The server came out through the door with another glass of tea and put it down on the table. She smiled at Nozomi and offered some leftover crab for Tama.
“She can’t eat right now,” said Jiji.
“What did you say?” asked Nozomi.
“She can’t eat now, and the bus is coming in five minutes,” Jiji said. Nozomi smiled a fake smile, more of a snarl. “I’d better go and pay our bill,” he said, and went inside.
Nozomi looked at the steam vents and the pathways again. All of a sudden, she picked me up and carried me down to the alleyway by the footbath. As she held me close, I could feel her heart beating faster than usual. She walked down the narrow path, kissed me one last time, and set me free. That’s my girl.
“Run, Tama, run!” she shouted. So, I did. I ran for my life, my kittens’ lives, down the stone pathway. After darting down the steaming alleyway, I looked back one last time. Nozomi was crying and waving goodbye. Then, I slipped into the shadows, wondering if I would ever see her again.
About the author
Pachi Inkblots lives and writes in Beppu, Japan. Kittens like steam clouds is the first part of a longer story. Stay tuned for the next installment! Pachi inkblots is my nom de plume for language learner fiction.
About the illustrators
Anya Mahrani Kumarawati is a graduate of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. She is originally from Indonesia. Illustration is a hobby for her while she studies international relations. She is a rennaissance person with many talents. In Kittens like steam clouds, Anya added background designs and turned Manh-san's lineart to technicolour.
About the publisher
This story is a product of several agencies:
-
The Beppu Literary and Kitten Rescue Society, a semi-secret group of authors helping each other to develop literature in Japan. We also like cats.
-
StudioCLA.org, an international organization of academics authoring, translating, and simplifying narratives for language learning.
-
VivaBeppu, the website where this story is first being published. The illustrations in this story were subsidized by two grant-in-aid projects with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Copyright information
© 2023 Pachi Inkblots
All rights reserved.
Published with permission at https://vivaBeppu.wixsite.com/vivabeppu
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives 4.0
(CC BY-NC-ND)
Attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in a reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial – You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
NoDerivatives – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
