I Am A Cat by Natsume Sōseki
The nameless feline narrator is the best thing in Sōseki’s first novel by a mile. Witty and sarcastic, he is a scathing observer of the humans with whom he shares the world. His thoughts on trousers as a measure of human achievement provide an excellent example of his opinions:
Had mankind been created with an inborn readiness to be content with inequality, I cannot see why, born naked, they should not have been content to live and die unclothed. However, one of these primeval nudists seems to have communed with himself along the following lines. “Since I and all my fellowman are indistinguishably alike, what is the point of effort? However hard I strive I cannot of myself climb beyond the common rut. So, since I yearn to be conspicuous, I think I’ll drape myself in something that will draw the eyes and blow the minds of all these clones around me.” I would guess he thought and thought for at least ten years before he came up with a stupendous idea, that glory of man’s inventiveness, pants…
I’ve heard that it took Descartes, no intellectual slouch, a full ten years to arrive at his famous conclusion, obvious surely to any three year old, that I think and therefore I am. Since original thought is thus demonstrably difficult, perhaps one should concede that it was an intellectual feat, even if it took ten years, for the wits of proto-rickshawmen to formulate the notion of knickers. (p245)
He is also not above formulating the occasional pithy epithet, for example:
There is nothing quite so terrifying as the results of education. (p268)
In contrast, the sections of straight dialogue between the humans, unfiltered by the feline viewpoint, are much less interesting and the jokes wear thin pretty quickly. The book appears to need much more cat in it.
Perhaps this problem is down to nuances lost in translation. The novel is basically a satire, and jokes are often impossible to communicate in a different language. The cultural and linguistic distances between English and Japanese are large and the translators duly note the difficulties at the outset, pointing out that the original title of the book itself is pretty much untranslatable, and that there are similar issues encountered throughout. Wikipedia currently says:
Note that the title of the novel suffers in translation. In the original, it derives much of its humor from the fact that it uses pompous, formal wording wholly inappropriate to a house cat – the idiom used is that of a member of a high-born family; a more literal translation would read “We are a Cat”, using the English royal plural form.
Whoever wrote that is obviously unaware that were cats able to speak they would undoubtedly employ hypercorrect phraseology, and would be likely to exhibit sesquipedalian tendencies, something that Sōseki clearly understood. Moreover, it is precisely from the natural feline detachment of the narrator that the greatest humour is derived. The opinions of a dog in the same situation would not be in the least bit interesting, because he would consider himself, at best, an equal to the humans whose home he inhabited. Anyone who knows cats knows that their observations on people, even those that they do not dislike, would be acerbic, all concealed claws and superiority. One can only blame the current pernicious fad of LOLCats for the insulting attitude towards the correct anthropomorphisation of felines exhibited by Wikipedia. Besides, a novel of this length written entirely in LOL would test the patience of even the most die-hard internet meme-molester, LOLCat Bibles notwithstanding.
A word of warning about this edition: the introduction gives away the ending, and whilst this is certainly not a plot-driven novel, it is still really annoying. Every so oftern I forget the universal desire of the literary critic to ruin the book under discussion for everyone ignorant enough to have arrived at said book after he did, and I accidentally read his introductory wafflings (which are invariably unedifying), and have the story ruined as a result. If I wanted to know what happens on the last page before reading the first, I would look at the last page first. Introductions never tell you anything useful anyway, and they should be put at the back of the book, after the notes, index, and those adverts you sometimes get, so anyone forgetful of the stupidity of literary critics won’t be ambushed by their inconsiderate tendency to spoil the story for the unsuspecting reader.
Also of passing interest: this weird, stupendously expensive I Am A Cat-themed pen features abalone shell detailing, which is probably a direct reference to the abalone shell that the narrator of the novel eats his cat food out of.