Why Must Read I Am a Cat (Tuttle Classics)?

The cat in question is a brilliantly opinionated, unnamed stray kitten that lands in the household of a distracted schoolteacher and his young family. The cat's master is undoubtably Soseki himself, whom Cat describes as a selfish, dispeptic, mustachioed dimwit who doesn't know his own children's ages. (The fact that Soseki was writing and publishing as many as four books a year while suffering from serious stomach ailments that would kill him only twelve years later are beyond the cat's comprehension.) The rest of the household doesn't fare much better in his feline opinion: the schoolteacher's wife is hilariously abstracted; the maid is grotesquely incompetent, and the children, including a tyrannical toddler, are beyond control. Things improve for the cat when the master publishes a short story about him--as Soseki himself did--that gives the animal a measure of fame. Secure in his adoptive household, the lordly cat sits in on his master's philosophizing with his friends, his nonchalant marital banter, and a nasty feud with a rich neighbor. His adventures and hilarious overheard dialogue fill three novels--470 pages in all--covering subjects as varied as baseball, Greek philosophy, literature (not only Japanese but English and Chinese), changing social mores, marriage and suicide. While it's hard to convey the wit of Soseki's prose, it retains a freshness 113 years after publication, something that can't be said for his contemporaries' writing, no matter the language. More startling still is the fact that Soseki the author comes up in one of the master's conversations with his friends--and not flatteringly. The writer-as-character device was hailed as post-modern when Martin Amis tried it in the 1990's, so it's fair to call it post-modern here. "I Am a Cat" is a masterpiece of universal appeal with no equivalent. It deserves to be more widely known.