CAT IMAGERY IN HARUKI MURAKAMI'S FICTION

Adelina Vasile

[email protected]

Abstract: The cat is a recurrent and significant presence in the lives of

Haruki Murakami's characters. This essay aims to enrich the already abundant
criticism on Murakami by exploring the use of cat symbolism in his major
fiction. Revisiting psychoanalytical theories, the article explores the images
projected by Murakami onto his fictional cats. Split into good and painful or bad
images, cats serve as substitutes for children and as dreadful father (parental)
and female figures in the unconscious zoo of the characters' psyche. This
analysis reveals that, tracking down the symbolism of Murakami's elusive cats,
the reader can obtain valuable insight into the dark meanders of the
labyrinthine human mind.

Keywords: cat, animal, symbolism, the unconscious, human mind,

sadism, identity

The animal as archetype represents the deep layers of the

subconscious and of instincts. Animals are considered to have relations
with the three levels of the universe: hell, earth, sky.
According to Jung, animals symbolize the “divine” side of the human
psyche and are much more connected than human beings to a “secret”
order in nature itself and to “absolute knowledge” of the unconscious.
Animal symbolism abounds in the unconscious, where a vast zoo is
concealed. Paraphrasing Freud, Vamik Volkan affirms that “the mind is
first and foremost an animal mind!” (Animals as Large – Group Symbols,
31)
As psychoanalytic literature shows, people use animals - real or
imaginary - to express a wide range of unconscious processes. Volkan
believes that there is “complex and intertwined relationship of mankind’s


Lecturer, ''Dimitrie Cantemir'' Christian University, Bucharest
internal and external world that we find expressed in animal symbols” and
“the symbolic significance of animals is sometimes obvious and primal,
such as those associated with fertility, warfare, wisdom, or specific
behaviors, while in other cases animals are used as symbols for complex
and abstract ideas and beliefs.”
It is impossible not to notice that in Haruki Murakami's novels animal
imagery and symbolism are a major presence. His rich fictional zoo is
teeming with real and fantastical animals, animals that can also be found
in the Chinese zodiac: the (phantom) sheep, the cat, the dog, the fish, the
dolphin, the whale, the (super)frog, the bird, the unicorn, the kangaroo,
the elephant, the inkling or darkling (闇黒), the leech, etc. Some of them
play key roles in the characters' lives and figure prominently in the
relationship between the individual's inner map and outer physical reality.
Jay Rubin argues that animals fascinate Murakami for what they have in
common with the subconscious life of the human mind: they lack rational
thinking and they are connected to mysterious forces. Unfortunately, they
are unable to communicate (51). Murakami remedies this latter aspect in
the case of cats, which he endows with the ability to talk.
The most recurrent and meaningful animal presence in Murakami's
fiction is the cat. Whoever ordered the design of one of the sites1 dedicated
to the great author, must have noticed this significant aspect, since the
bottom of the site's pages is patrolled by three cats.
Cats are elusive creatures in Murakami's fiction because not only do
they tend to disappear from their owners' lives, but also elude
understanding, owing to the richness of ideas and images that merge into
Murakamian cat symbolism.
Cat imagos oscillate between positive/diurnal and negative/nocturnal
aspects. The characters' overall interaction with cats reveals the good cat/
bad cat split. Characters and cats solace, haunt, hunt and devour each
other.
Murakami's profound attachment to cats is well known. Besides
owning cats, the author widely used the cat as a lucky charm, a mascot.
Cat imagery and cat figurines represent(ed) a significant part of the
Murakami family's home decorations.

1 The site's address is http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/site.php.

 In 1974, Murakami and his wife also played with cat theme when they
set up a coffee-bar-cum-jazz-club called “Peter Cat” (named after
Murakami's late and much beloved tomcat pet) in a Tokyo suburb. At that
time, the “original” tomcat had been sent to a friend's country house to
recover from the stress of city life. In 1977 the Murakamis moved the bar
more centrally and when they decorated it, they played again with cat
imagery. Outside, customers could enjoy the big, smiling face of the
Cheshire Cat; inside, they could admire cat figurines lying on all tables and
on the piano, cat pictures and paintings.
In the comic-realistic description of the decrepit cat in A Wild Sheep
Chase Murakami may have used as a source of inspiration his own
tomcat's aspect:

The cat was anything but cute. Rather, he weighed in at the opposite
end of the scale, his fur was scruffy like an old, threadbare carpet, the tip
of his tail was bent at a sixty degree angle, his teeth were yellowed, his
right eye oozed pus from a wound three years before so that by now he
could hardly see. It was doubtful that he could distinguish between a
tennis shoe and a potato. The pads of his feet were sriveled-up corns, his
ears were infested with ear lice, and from sheer age he farted at least
twenty times a day. He'd been a fine young tom the day my wife found
him under a park bench and brought him home, but in the last few years
he'd rapidly gone downhill. Like a bowling ball rolling toward the gutter
(151-152).

Asked why cats play such a considerable role in his characters' lives,
Murakami modestly claims to know nothing about cat symbolism:

Cats appear frequently in your fiction, and in this book2 they play a
particularly memorable role, what with the detailed description of how a
deranged sculptor preys on cats. Why are cats so important to your
characters and your stories?
It must be because I'm personally fond of cats. I've always had them
around since I was little. But I don't know whether they have any other
significance.

2 The interviewer refers to the novel Kafka on the Shore.

 A pervasive presence in the lives of Murakami's characters, the cat
becomes part of human identity. This is how the narrator in A Wild Sheep
Chase introduces to the reader his friend J., the owner of a bar: “He had a
cat, smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, never touched a drop of alcohol.
That's the sum of everything I know about J” (87-88).
Not all of the characters have cats but, wherever there is a couple,
usually there is also a cat. Like Murakami, married couples in his fictional
world have no children - they have a cat instead.
In A Wild Sheep Chase the narrator's marriage is broken up and the
cat is visibly weakened by illness and old age. The tomcat had been found
by his wife and is all that is she leaves behind, besides a dying geranium.
Before leaving, she had taken everything that belonged to her and cut out
the parts with her from the shots of both of them, leaving behind only the
narrator's image or photos of him alone, “as if I'd been alone at birth, alone
all my days, and would continue alone. A slip! She could have at least left a
slip!” (20). He not only laments, but also projects his dejection on the cat,
attributing his own feelings to it: “[...] probably even the cat would feel
more comfortable having her things around” (19). The comforting thought
that “[...] all in all, this was hardly what you could call a tragedy” (22)
disguises the fact that he subconsciously wishes that the relationship were
not over. This desire is reflected in the protagonist's special concern for the
cat's well-being. Here are the indications he gives over the phone to an
yakuza to whom he has to entrust the cat before leaving in search of a
mysterious sheep:

“Don't feed him fatty meat. He throws it all up. His teeth are bad, so
no hard foods. In the morning, he gets milk and canned cat food, in the
evening a handful of dried fish or meat or cheese snacks. Also please
change his litter box daily. He doesn't like it dirty. He often gets diarrhea,
but if it doesn't go away after two days the vet will have some medicine to
give him.” [...] “He's starting to get lice in his ears”, I continued, “so once a
day you should give his ears a cleaning with a cotton swab and a little
olive oil. He dislikes it and fights it, so be careful not to rupture the
eardrum. Also, if you're worried he might claw the furniture, trim his
claws once a week. Regular nail clippers are fine. I'm pretty sure he
doesn't have fleas, but just in case it might be wise to give him a flea bath
every so often. You can get flea shampoo at any pet shop. After his bath,
you should dry him off with a towel and give him a good brushing, then
last of all a once-over with a hair dryer. Otherwise he'll catch cold” (146).

For a character prone to passivity like the narrator, keeping the cat
alive is the only way he can control the situation externally and preserve
what is left of his relationship with his wife. The cat becomes a transitional
object meant to provide the narrator with comfort, to ease the pain of
separateness and aloneness.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle begins with a domestic drama - the
disappearance of the Okada family's tomcat, which precedes the wife's
disappearance. Here, the cat is a symbol of the bond between man and
woman, of what unites them. As Kumiko Okada points out, the cat is very
important to them both because they had found it in the week after their
wedding. Conscious of its value as an element that cemented their
relationship, as a symbol of the union between her and Tōru, of what was
good and beautiful between them, Kumiko urges Tōru to go and search for
the missing cat.
As Jonathan Dil remarked in Woman as Symptom and the Void at the
Heart of Subjectivity: A Lacanian Reading of Murakami Haruki's 'The
Wind-up Bird Chronicle', “the cat is a symbol of the domestic harmony
that Tōru and Kumiko have established in their six years together, but
their marriage quickly unravels with the cat's disappearance.”
What Kumiko does not realize is that the cat is also a substitute for the
baby she aborted. Thus, the triad husband-wife-child is translated as
husband-wife-cat in Murakami's fiction.
The cat's disappearance is a bad omen, it signifies a damaged or a
dying relationship. Tōru thinks that cats have a special way of living and, if
a cat decides to leave home, it knows very well why it acts like this. Deeply
troubled, Kumiko feels that the cat has died and his body is rotting among
weeds. When Toru's search for the cat turns out to be fruitless, she accuses
him of not really wanting to find it. Unable to accept the loss of the cat,
Kumiko even resorts to a clairvoyant's help. Shortly after the cat goes
missing, Kumiko leaves her husband for another man. Eventually, after a
long time, the cat returns. Its appearance is related to Tōru's hope for a
possible reconciliation with his wife. In the end, Tōru succeeds in
contacting Kumiko, although the question of whether she will return to
him remains unanswered.
In Kafka on the Shore cats are also child(-like) figures (victims). The
author anthropomorphizes them by bestowing them with an important
attribute that characterizes human beings: capability for speech. Cats are
able to converse with Nakata - a mentally defective old man who is
illiterate, and thus “a kind of animalized human” (Willmott. 72) - who is
endowed with the capacity of communicating with cats. He uses this ability
to gather information from them and find missing cats in his
neighborhood. To make interaction easier, Nakata gives the cats human
names (Otsuka, Kawamura, Okawa), not because he wants to mark
ascendancy and domination, but because he reveres and respects them.
The infantile Nakata allows cats to rank as his full equals or even
superiors, which can be noticed in the way he speaks to cats about
members of their species - he uses the word 猫さん3, as though they were
human beings.
In some of the scenes, cats appear as smaller versions of naïve,
helpless little children4 that can be easily lured and lead astray by
malevolent people and risk becoming subject to maltreatment. As the
Siamese cat Mimi describes her own species, “cats are powerless, weak
little creatures that injure easily” (104).
In this novel cats also vanish mysteriously. The cause of the
disappearance turns out to be a malevolent spirit, a monstrous, hollow
apparition that kidnaps them and takes them to an alien reality.
The search for a particular runaway cat called Goma leads the simple-
minded Nakata to the house of “the infamous cat-killer Johnnie Walker”,
an icon with human form, the literal embodiment of the renowned Johnnie

3 The word 猫さん(nekosan) is composed of 猫 (neko) = 'cat' and さん (san) - a

honorific suffix that is used for addressing or referring to people and can be attached both
to first names and surnames.
4 Murakami's language associates cats with children. A lost/ stray/ missing cat

is迷子の猫 (maigo no neko). 迷子means 'lost child'. In this context, the word 'lost' is a
combination of 迷う(mayou) = to lose one's way and 子(ko) = child. For cats that go
missing, the author also uses the verb 迷子になる(maigo ni naru) = to be (get) lost, to lose
one's way.
Walker logo from the whiskey bottle. This mysterious figure is in fact the
identificatory projection of a famous sculptor named Koichi Tamura, who
uses it to activate in a nightmarish, surrealistic world that overlaps with
the real world and has effects in it.
Like Tamura, Walker follows his own inner laws, which are beyond
notions of good an evil. The sculptor's artistic force stems from his
connection “to something very unusual”, “something beyond good an evil”,
“the source of power” (267). He is a creator who treats his fellow humans
as if they were his own creations, which he can “make or break as he sees
fit” (266). Creative though he is in relation to inanimate matter from which
he obtains “original, provocative, powerful” and “uncompromising” pieces,
he is destructive in inter-human relationships: “[...] the dregs left over
from creating these he spread everywhere, like poison you can't escape.
[He] polluted everything he touched, damaged everyone everyone around
him” (267).
Johnnie Walker, Tamura's strange version in the metaphysical world,
is as sinister a figure as the sculptor is. The insensate Walker is a master of
extreme sadism, guilty of “horrific genocide enacted upon animals”
(Willmott 72). If his behavior - very much resembling one resulting from a
paroxysm of brain dysfunction - were that of a real human being, the
diagnosis would probably be sadistically tinged paranoid personality
disorder.
He lures stray felines in a vacant plot of land, throws them into a sack
and takes them home, where he injects them with a paralyzing substance
which does not prevent them from feeling “unimaginable” pain. He drinks
whiskey and then starts slicing open the cats' bellies, tears out the still-
beating hearts, pops them into his mouth and chews them slowly, savoring
the taste, his eyes glistening “like those of a child enjoying a pastry hot
from the oven” (190), while whistling “Heigh-Ho!” - the jolly tune
associated with Disney's Seven Dwarfs from Snow White 5. The work's
final stage describes Walker as a type of twisted artist:

5 In a striking way, cat-torturing, whiskey-drinking and music are elements that also
figure in a psychopathological case reported by Volkan, about a man with “a background
of severe frustrations in childhood”, who has sadomasochistic, erotic interactions with the
 Still whistling his jolly tune, Johnnie Walker sawed the cat's head off.
The teeth of the saw crunched through the bone and severed it. He seemed
to know exactly what he was doing. The neck bone wasn't very thick, so
the whole operation was quickly finished. But the sound had a strange
weight to it. Johnnie Walker lovingly placed the severed head on the
metal tray. As if relishing a work of art, he narrowed his eyes and gazed
at it intently (190).

The incomprehensible, demonic Walker leads himself by the rule of

meaningless, unjustified violence, remorse-free cruelty and destructiveness
that can be terrifyingly deep and intense: “There has to be pain. That's the
rule” (189).
His art consists in a collection of still-nature pieces - severed cat heads
– which he arranges neatly in a freezer. By collecting the heads he means
to harvest the cats' souls/ spirits (猫の魂) and use them to construct a
bizarre, magical flute:

“Listen - I'm not killing cats just for the fun of it. I'm not so disturbed
I find it amusing,” he went on. “I'm not just some dilettante with time on
his hands. It takes a lot of time and effort to gather and kill this many
cats. I'm killing them to collect their souls, which I use to create a special
kind of flute. And when I blow that flute it'll let me collect even larger
souls. Then I collect larger souls and make an even bigger flute. Perhaps
in the end I'll be able to make a flute so large it'll rival the universe. But
first come the cats. Gathering their souls is the starting point of the whole
project. There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a
way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order. It's
what you need to do when you're dealing with other souls. It's not
pineapples and melons I'm working with here, agreed?” (184).

The world-renowned sculptor and his doppelgänger, Johnnie Walker,

share the same the search for absolute power over life, over what animates
all living being and represents the essence of the human/animal being.

family pet – a cat. He tortures the animal while drinking whiskey and listening to classical
music and derives sexual pleasure from the cat's pain ( 20-21).
Tamura's maltreatment of his human fellows in the “real” world has a
correspondent in Walker's parallel world - it translates to torture and
execution of feline fellows.
The two characters' violent behavior conceals a desire to wield
absolute power over human beings, over beings endowed with what they
lack: soul.
According to Erich Fromm, the desire to have complete power over
someone reflects an extreme desire for knowledge that can lead to extreme
sadism. The psychoanalyst considers that cruelty is motivated by
something more profound: the desire to find out the secret of things and of
life (32).
Walker's psychopathological (ab)use of cats echoes animal sacrifice in
satanic rituals and the form it takes discloses an involvement of cultural
factors. The gruesome and agonizing ritual of evisceration and beheading
enacted by the serial cat killer is reminiscent of the long and bloody
Japanese tradition of ritual disembowelment (seppuku切腹 or
harakiri腹切) carried out by an executioner.
The fragments of the body that are assailed, exposed, consumed or
preserved are precisely the three parts regarded as the seats of the
individual's essence in Eastern and Western conceptions of the body: the
viscera6, the heart7 and the head8.
The act of spilling and exposing the labyrinth of reddish intestines can
be interpreted as an attempt to bring to light what is concealed, to get to
the essence of things, to explore the inner maze of the self and the
mysteries of the unconscious. An allusion to the layout of the labyrinth,
guts represent the complex, hidden aspects of inner consciousness, the
maze of the mind that stands between the individual and (knowledge of)
the real. The exposure of the inner labyrinth of guts may also symbolize
the discovery of a way out of the labyrinth of destiny where the individual
often has to face dangerous elements.

6 The abdominal region (腹) was considered to be the seat of thought and emotion.
This is an idea that may have old Japanese roots.
7 The heart was once widely recognized as the house of the human soul.

8 Some ancient cultures viewed the head or skull to be the seat of the soul, the seat of

power.
 In Kafka on the Shore the sculptor's main theme of exploration in his
works is the subconscious and he is best known for a piece entitled
Labyrinth.
The idea of the labyrinth is a recurrent obsession in Murakami's
fiction. In Kafka on the Shore some characters discuss the origin of the
notion of labyrinth that stems from an ancient Mesopotamian ritual of
exposing the disembowelled intestines of an enemy on the sand to divine
the course of the future.
Eventually, Nakata finds a way out of the lab(yrinth) of pain that is
Walker's home. When Walker starts to perform his usual, grisly ritual of
macabre killing in front of Nakata, the normally innocuous old man loses
control and stabs the catnapper in order to stop the cat-killing orgy. Thus,
the remaining feline children are rescued.
As psychoanalysis suggests, in stories featuring an animal or a human
relation with an animal, the primary or direct referent is not the fictional
animal. The animal is only a vehicle or receptacle of meaning
unconsciously projected onto it. Real and imagined animals play an
important role in hiding and expressing human fears and anxieties.
Although it seems that Murakami deliberately chose not to have
children9, he blessed himself and his fictional couples with feline children.
For the author himself, cats may also be symbolic substitutes for the
children he doesn't have. The author's play with hurting the cat/rescuing
the cat in Kafka on the Shore, the way he chooses to manage the gory cat-
killing scenes – the cat killer is killed - may suggest the existence of an
intrapsychic conflict, of some unconscious impulses and repudiated
desires that return, may express a subconscious anxiety over the decision
he took.
In chapter eight of his novel 1Q84, “Time for the Cats to Come”,
Murakami introduces a fantastical story entitled “Town of Cats” by a
German author. The tale is fictionally written in the period between the

9 It seems that children were out of question when the Murakamis were running the
jazz club and when Murakami began writing, but he seems to have had reservations about
the idea anyway. 'I can't have children,' he told an interviewer in 1984. 'I simply don't
have the confidence my parents' generation had after the war that the world would
continue to improve.'
two world wars in Germany, being included in the anthology of short
stories that Tengo, the main male character, reads on the train to his
father’s sanatorium. The story looks very much like a record of the
delusions, hallucinations and persecutory dreads experienced by a
disrupted human mind in which cats escape from the mental zoo, invade
the psyche and assume control over it.
It is the story of a young man on vacation “traveling alone at his whim
with no destination in mind” who gets off the train at a station where no-
one else does to explore an unknown town. The town seems abandoned,
“utterly still” and “totally uninhabited” - there is literally no one around
(426). Things change after sunset, when over-sized cats10 invade and
occupy the town, imitating the behavior of the people who once lived there
and engaging in all sorts of human activities. Thus, the young man finds
out that the entire town is ruled by talking cats. Taken aback, he takes
refuge into the bell tower. He hides himself for days, even though his good
senses are telling him to leave the town. Although trains stop at the town
station twice a day, his sense of adventure and curiosity about the town of
cats prevent him from boarding them. On the third night he is sensed by
cats:

“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,” yet another cat says.
“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.”
“But that smell is definitely here” (427).

The fearful man thinks that a tragic fate awaits him if he is discovered
by cats in this dimension where he is not supposed to be - “he is sure that
they will never let him leave the town alive now that he has learned their
secret” (428).

10 Huge, monstrous cats - mythical “cat demons” (猫股) - also appear in Japanese
legends of cat sorcery. They are described as creatures endowed with a forked tail and the
power to assume human form and bewitch mankind. The ability to bewitch human beings
is a quality the cat shares with foxes and badgers in Japanese myths and legends.
 The cats form groups to hunt him down, clearly angry over the
intrusion of a human. However, they don’t seem to be able to find him.
They can smell him, but they can't see him, as if he were transparent. He
realizes that his stay there has become dangerous and decides to leave the
Town of Cats, but when the train comes the next day, it doesn’t stop for
him, as if he has become invisible to everyone-else - the engineer seated at
the controls and the passengers. Then, it suddenly dawns on him that he is
stuck forever in the town of cats, that “[...] he is irretrievably lost. This is
no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be
lost. It is a place not of this world that has been prepared especially for
him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to
take him back to his original world” (428).
Tengo re-reads the story, because the phrase “the place where he is
meant to be lost” attracts his attention. He seems to grasp some clear
similarities between the dreadful situation of the young man and himself.
Tengo's own Town of Cats is his relationship with his (non-biological?)
father. The young traveller in the German story appears to be invisible to
the cats and then to humans, which means he is nothing to them, just like
Tengo has been to his father.
When Tengo gets to his father’s bedside at the sanatorium, his father
doesn’t recognize him, as if he too were invisible. When Tengo's arrival is
announced by the nurse, “[...] he looked straight at Tengo as if he were
reading a bulletin written in a foreign language” (431). Mirrored in his
father's “expressionless eyes”, Tengo is made to suspect once more what he
has always suspected - that the old man is not his biological father, that
there is no blood connection between them: “You are nothing,” his father
repeated the words, his voice devoid of emotion. “You were nothing, you
are nothing, and you will be nothing” (432).
Tengo reads the story to his father. The two men speculate that the
town had been built by human beings who left it or died in an epidemic.
The possibility of men having been devoured by cats is not taken into
consideration here. The vacuum that resulted when the town was deserted
was then filled by cats simply because, as his father says, “when a vacuum
forms, something has to come along to fill it. Because that's what
everybody does” (436). This is precisely what Tengo's father did: he filled
the father's place, but did not bond normally with his son, turned a blind
eye to his needs and was unable to love him.
The Town of Cats is a place of desolation, fear, alienation,
powerlessness, a place where one is not oneself, where one feels
inadequate. The interest shown by Tengo in the German story is caused by
the fact that the story evokes the inner and outer atmosphere he
experienced in his childhood, in which he felt trapped and which he hated
with all his heart. The cats are (potentially) destructive, alien presences,
like Tengo's parents, who were emotionally absent from his life, didn't
recognize Tengo's identity or kinship and tried to obstruct his individual
development. Thus, the cats stand for primal parental figures imbued with
cannibalistic powers.
Being a toothed animal, the cat can be associated with ferocity,
ravenousness, eating and being eaten. In the short story Man-Eating Cats
the cat appears as a symbolic mental imago of oral sadism. Man-Eating
Cats begins with a creepy story in a newspaper article that the male
narrator reads to his lover. The article is about a seventy year old woman
in Athens who was eaten by her three beloved cats. The woman lived alone,
had no relatives or friends that paid her regular visits and she died
probably from a heart attack, leaving three cats trapped in her apartment
with no food for a whole week. On the verge of starvation, the animals
were forced to feed off the woman's corpse.
The narrator in Man-Eating Cats is an adulterous man who has fled to
an obscure Greek island with his lover, Izumi, after the illicit love affair is
exposed and their happy marriages break down.
Izumi shows curiosity about the fate of the three cats, wanting to know
if they were freed or killed because they'd eaten human flesh. She also
remembers a strange parable from the Catholic school she attended, about
what you are supposed to do if you are marooned on a desert island with a
cat and have very limited food supplies. She remembers feeling shocked to
hear that you shouldn’t share the food but let the cat starve.
The narrator painfully realizes that he is trapped in “an alien reality”
on the island and feels disconnected from everything around him. He is
there not because he really wanted to, but because Izumi shows an interest
in Greece. By letting himself be completely absorbed/ consumed in the
new relationship and discarding his former Tokyo life - including his wife,
his 4-year-old son, his job, his country - he has discarded essential parts of
his identity. He is now totally dependent on Izumi, who is the only human
being he knows, the only link to his past life and his sense of himself.
A few days after reading the newspaper article, the narrator
remembers his childhood cat, which “disappeared in the strangest way”.
She scrambled up an “ancient pine tree in the garden, so tall you could
barely see the top of it” and never went down. Later that night, Izumi
disappears from the bed and he goes out to search for her. While walking
in the moonlight, “without warning”, the narrator feels as if he has also
disappeared, as if his identity has vanished. He suddenly hears Izumi's
voice explaining to him that “The real you has been eaten by the cats.
While you've been standing here, those hungry cats have devoured you -
eaten you all up. All that's left is bones.”
Unable to find Izumi, the narrator returns to the apartment alone,
drinks alcohol and imagines the three cats from the newspaper story
devouring him entirely:

I returned to the cottage and downed a glass of brandy. I tried to go

to sleep, bit I couldn't. Until the eastern sky grew light, I was held in the
grip of the moon. Then, suddenly, I pictured those cats, starving to death
in a locked apartment. I - the real me - was dead, and they were alive,
eating my flesh, biting into my heart, sucking my blood, devouring my
penis. Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's
witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that
thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of
my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and
faded away.

In this story the cat imago signifies dangerous oral-sadistic impulses,

discloses the narrator's castration anxiety and pinpoints the cannibalistic
nature of the narrator’s relationship with Izumi, who has devoured him
and stripped him of his identity. Here, the cat becomes a psychic
representation of the dangerous (devouring and castrating) female lover.
 In Murakami's fictional world cats are associated with disappearance,
(oral) sadism and mysterious, alien worlds11. As John Updike noted, “cats
frequently figure in Murakami’s fiction, as delegates from another world.”
They are central to the story and their disappearance propels the story
forward. The cats in Kafka on the Shore mediate between the “real” world
and a parallel world that defies rational explanation. In Kafka on the Shore
the search for a lost cat leads to a series of gruesome events and
discoveries that take place both in the “real” world and in a metaphysical
world; in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the protagonist's search for his
missing tomcat leads him to a deserted backyard with a deep well that
serves as a portal to another world, to inner darkness or the depth of the
unconscious.
Cats also function as barometers that register or predict the evolution,
the ups and downs of inter-human relationships. A cat's disappearance is a
bad omen, being usually associated with or predicting the disappearance of
a female figure. Cats also stand for human figures: child surrogates seeking
rescue, castrative father (parental) and female figures. Murakami's
fictional cats are enchanting and intriguing creatures that set the story in
motion. Even when they disappear, they play the part of heralds issuing
the call to adventures that disrupt the day-to-day existence of the
protagonist and of the reader, inviting them to difficult journeys into the
fantastic maze of the human mind.

REFERENCES

Primary Literature
1. Murakami, Haruki, (2000) [1982], A Wild Sheep Chase. Alfred
Birnbaum (trans.), London: Harvill Press, Print.
2. ---, (2005) [2002], Kafka on the Shore. Philip Gabriel (trans.).
London: Vintage, Print.
3. ---, (2002), 海辺のカフカ. 東京：株式会社新潮社, Print.
4. ---, (1997) [1995], The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Jay Rubin (trans.).
New York: Vintage, Print.

The cat is, in fact, primarily a nocturnal creature. Being a night creature, secret
11

knowledge and otherworldliness are attributes contained in its philosophical symbolism.

 5. ---, (2011), 1Q84. Jay Rubin (trans.). London: Harvill Secker, Print.
6. ---, “Man-Eating Cats”. Philip Gabriel (trans.). The New Yorker. 4.
Dec. 2000. Web. 20 Dec. 2012.

Secondary Literature
Books
1. Akhtar Salman, Volkan, Vamik (ed.), (2005), Mental Zoo: Animals
in the Human Mind and its Pathology. Madison: International Universities
Press, Inc.
2. Chevalier, Jean, Gheerbrant, Alain, (1993), Dicţionar de simboluri.
Bucureşti: Artemis.
3. Davis, F. Hadland, (1992) [1913], Myths and Legends of Japan.
New York: Dover Publications Inc.
4. From, Erich, (1995) [1956], Arta de a iubi. Bucureşti: Anima
5. Rubin, Jay, (2005), Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.
London: Vintage
6. Willmott, Glenn, (2011), Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity
and Wealth in Comics and Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press
Internet Resources
1. Brown, Mick. “Tales of the unexpected”. The Telegraph. 15. Aug.
2003. Web. 21. Dec. 2012.
2. Dil, Jonathan. “Woman as Symptom and the Void at the Heart of
Subjectivity: A Lacanian Reading of Murakami Haruki's 'The Wind-up
Bird Chronicle'”. electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies. 30
Nov. 2009. Web. 22 Dec. 2012.
3. Updike, John. “Subconscious Tunnels: Haruki Murakami’s
dreamlike new novel”. The New Yorker. 24 Jan. 2005. Web. 28 Dec. 2012.
4. Volkan, Vamik. “Animals as Large-Group Symbols”. Web. 28 Dec.
2012.
5. Questions for Murakami about Kafka on The Shore.
Randomhouse.com. 2004. Web. 29 Dec. 2012.