By Alfred Brown
1.
I was lying in a pool of warm mud. No. I was the mud. And then I woke up. At least, I think I did.
I woke up and noticed beside me a small, brown, striped cat. I thought to myself, I hate cats. Then I remembered, no I love cats. I must still be groggy.
“Do you mind if I give you a name?” I said to the cat. “How about Noboru Wataya? No, that’s the name of someone I dislike. How about Noboru Watanabe? I’ve always liked that name. Or I could call you something ironical. Like Crow or Rat.”
“No thank you,” said the cat. “I eat those, it wouldn’t make sense to be called that. I already have a name, it is Haruki Murakami.”
“Oh, like the author,” I said.
“I am the author,” he said defiantly. He licked his paw while I waited for him to continue. He pulled out a manuscript of nowhere and handed (pawed?) to me. I looked at it, it was just the word “meow” written a hundred thousand times on hundreds of pages. “Of course, I have other people like Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, and Philip Gabriel translate it for me. It loses something in the translation, of course.”
“How do you write without opposable thumbs to hold the pen? Or without fingers to type the keys?”
“I dip my tail into ink and write calligraphy on long scrolls. Of course, I use only non-toxic ink, because I bathe myself clean with my tongue after I am done. You must excuse me, I feel a need to lick my privates.” To which, the cat licked his privates with ease.
“I feel blessed to have Haruki Murakami lick his privates in my presence.” I thank him and bow.
“Well, don’t feel too special. I am a cat. I do this all the time. I’m sure humans would do it too if they could bend enough. It is very relaxing. Like sitting in a pool of warm mud.” The cat gets up and walks toward the kitchen. “Would you like a sandwich? I make excellent sandwiches.”
He goes and opens the refrigerator door with ease. He is a very strong cat. “Hmm, no dead mice in here. Can’t make a decent sandwich without them,” the cat said. I think of the weirder things kept in refrigerators in his stories, like the one Johnny Walker had. But I think better of telling him so. I change the topic.
“You must be very strong to open that refrigerator with just your paw.”
“Well,” he said, “I run a lot of marathons. Of course, I take naps regularly in the middle of them. Get distracted with pieces of string. But I finish them eventually. I refuse to wear the numbers on my body though. Cats don’t like having to wear things, as you know.”
I think of having a cigarette. Then I remembered I had quit and suck on a lemon drop. There was much I wanted to ask him. “I really liked Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I was a little surprised by the ending. I know you were setting it up so that it wouldn’t be shocking for the protagonist to eventually get stuck in his mind at the end. But it was just the second of your novels that I had read. After a while I got used to the bittersweet endings that go with all your works.”
“What was the first novel you read?” he asked. But he wasn’t too interested, it seemed. He was licking his privates again.
“Hear the Wind Sing. It was really hard to get in America. Let me tell you. I had to order it online. Twenty-seven bucks and the thing was tiny. Even tinier when I realized a lot of the back of the book was just notes. Notes, by the way, they never bothered to translate into English. Maybe they were just translating notes. But it was really good. I was hooked after that. I want to read the rest of the trilogy, but the other books are also hard to come by.”
“Eh, I never really liked my first novels, I never thought they were very good,” the cat said.