I tookA Short Course in Everyday Magicfrom the shelf.
He was right. In the chapter that was called “Feline Philosophy,”there was a section about the maneki-neko.
MANeKI-NeKO: THe LUCKY CAT
Although this figure is very popular with Japanese shopkeepers, its origins must be sought in ninth-century China, where it was believed that a cat cleaning its ear with its paw was a sign that a visitor was coming. The animal was edgy before the arrival of a stranger and showed it with this gesture of washing its face and ears. Some sources claim that the cat’s story goes back to a real-life story in the Edo period (1603–1868). A cat named Tama was always on the porch of a temple built next to a large tree in the western area of Tokyo. One rainy day, a nobleman took refuge under the tree, and Tama kept trying to attract his attention by beckoning with a paw. Curious about the cat’s behavior, the man left his refuge and went to see why the cat was doing this. Just then, the tree was struck by a bolt of lightning, which also destroyed everything around it. Moved by the cat’s solicitousness, the nobleman became a benefactor of the temple.
Another tale concerns a very poor woman called Imado. She could barely keep herself alive, so had to sell her cat. One night the cat appeared to her in a dream, telling her to make clay models in its likeness as a lucky charm. She obeyed the cat, and a passerby saw the figure and wanted to buy it. From then on, she made so many cats, which she sold to so many people, that she became rich.
“Most enlightening.” I was mildly sarcastic. “But that doesn’t tell me anything. Why would someone send me a lucky cat? I don’t know anyone in Japan.”
“It might be a sign that a stranger is arriving. Or maybe you need good luck for some adventure you’re going to embark on soon.”
These two possibilities sounded like prophecies by a sinister oracle. I knew from experience that the coming of a stranger always left a string of bothersome complications in its wake. As for adventures that require good luck, I’d call them calamities.
I still had to discover whatwabi-sabimeant. Something told me I’d soon find out.
Endangered Species
We’d finished classes in the Faculty of Philology, and my time was now taken up with curriculum planning meetings, exam monitoring and a few hours of tutoring for which hardly anyone turned up.
That Tuesday morning, I was amusing myself by watching how the summer light slid through the big window to light up a landscape of cracks and dust on my old office table. Suddenly I caught myself sighing.
Since I’d got my PhD in German Studies and started to work as a lecturer, everything had changed within the walls of that faculty building. The BA in German Philology, which I had studied, was no longer being offered, and the small pile of exam papers of the last group doing this course was now waiting for me in my office. There were barely a dozen students in my class, so they were almost like family. Now the course had been “discontinued”—which is to say it was to become extinct just like other archaic, unnecessary wild species, and I was going to be subsumed into the English Department.
I, too, was an endangered species.
My literature classes had been cut down to one, for PhD candidates. For the rest of my classes, I taught Goethe’s language to students who found the subject too demanding. German is like a lover who respects you only if she has your exclusive attention. If it’s taken as a minor subject by an English student, it can be hell. The long list of nouns with irregular plural forms and the complex declensions are enough to put anyone off, especially if they are taking only one or two classes a week.
Since the extinction of my degree course, therefore, I’d become a teacher of a language that brought more pain than joy to my students.
The only good thing about not having regular literature students, I told myself, was that I didn’t have to mark those exams—an almost impossible task in the Internet era. Nowadays, correcting an essay on any author or work means major research trying to find out the sources of the students’ plagiarism in that copy-and-paste mishmash they try to pass off as their own work.
When proctoring an exam in the classroom, I need a thousand eyes to make sure students aren’t using their smartphones as an endlessly resourceful cheat sheet.
I was musing about all this when my office door flew open and I saw a mop of curly blond hair. The girl asked if she could come in. Snapping out of my forty-five-year-old lecturer’s bout of nostalgia, I looked at her and noticed she had a triangular, cat-like face.
She was old enough to be a PhD student, but I’d never seen her before.
“Who are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
She came over to me and put a CD on the table. The cover showed a circle drawn in a single brush stroke. It seemed to have been done by a master of Japanese calligraphy.
“I’d like to know the meaning of the words on this CD,” she began in a low, melodious voice. “Could you listen, please—just for a minute?”
She took a Discman from her bag—an obsolete item in digital times. Another extinct species. She loaded the CD and offered me the headphones, which were emitting a male voice speaking a strange language.
I played my part of the lecturer in German with no time to waste. “You should go to the School of Languages,” I said. “We don’t teach Japanese in this faculty.”
“It’s not Japanese,” she said. “It’s a dead language, and I want to understand it. Or at least know what language it is . . .”
Taken aback by this, I started listening. With guitar chords in the background, a young man was singing a strangely melancholy air. I couldn’t make out a single word. It didn’t seem to be any Semitic language, or Germanic language either. The blonde girl waited impatiently for my verdict.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.” I handed back her Discman. “I haven’t got a clue—”
She interrupted. “At first I thought it might be Elvish, but a friend of mine who’s writing a thesis on Tolkien says that Elvish is completely different.”
