I Am a Cat

Having listened at the home of his master to smart talk about new trends in modern thought—above all, about fashionable individualism and the “superman”—the cat decided he himself was an extraordinary being, the true “son of the twentieth century.” The comic situation, as in Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” is that the dwarf measures the giant by the yardstick of his small world, with a complete sense of his own superiority. The master seems to the cat “a bit of an idiot”; the master’s antics and eccentricities are the height of absurdity. The dwarf doesn’t have the key to the giant’s soul. But that is only true if a creature from a small “cat” world encounters a truly big human.

Audio studio “Ardis” presents one of the most famous novels by a classic of 20th-century Japanese literature, Sōseki Natsume, the first major satirical work in Japanese literature of the new era. At birth the boy was named Kinnosuke (Sōseki’s literary pseudonym).