The school at which I teach is surrounded by the elderly. There is no other way of putting it. The buildings are old, the bikes are old, the cars are old, the shrines are old, but most important the people are old. It is a rare day in which I see someone under the age of seventy exit one of the houses. For the most part, I like the neighborhood. The old people are polite and, on occasion, they make an effort to be friendly. They come up to me and ask me questions about my life, the school, or for directions. It’s always awkward because I can’t answer them with any form of real Japanese and they just keep talking, thinking the more they say, the more likely the gibberish coming out of my mouth will make sense.
I’ve come to notice that a lot of the people in this neighborhood, being old, do not have the visual accuracy to determine that I’m not actually Japanese. This is probably why they have long and in depth conversations with me without realizing that my terrified expression indicates that I don’t understand what’s happening. But since these are all very nice people, I try to be as polite and communicate with them in Japanese by saying things like “wakarimasen” (I don’t understand), “sumimasen” (excuse me), and “gomenasai” (I’m sorry) which instead of explaining that I’m sorry I don’t understand what they are saying just confirms their misguided belief that I can actually hold a conversation in Japanese and that if they just talk more, I will say something of merit.
Over time, I noticed that the elderly in my neighborhood are very superstitious and that a lot of their superstitions have to do with cats. My favorite superstition so far is that if you put water in a clear plastic bottle and put it someplace, it will keep stray cats away. I’m guessing that the theory is based somehow on the water in the bottle reflecting light, which makes this practice almost completely useless since most stray cats come out at night when there isn’t enough light to reflect off the bottles.
I’m guessing that the cats also see very little merit in the water bottle theory. I have yet to see a cat walk through an alley and avoid the anti-cat devices placed in front of certain houses. In fact, I’ve even seen some cats use these cat deterrents to their advantage when they were liking the condensation off the bottles for a quick drink.
It’s needless to say stray cats are not very popular in Japan and the old people in my neighborhood seem to hate them the most. Instead of using water bottles to keep the strays away, they use poison. It doesn’t seem to matter to them if they kill a stray or someone’s pet, since they put poison chicken, cat food, or left over fish out on a plate and hope a cat takes it. One of the teachers once helped an elderly woman clean up the remains of her pet cat which one of her neighbors poisoned. It was a sad day for all of us since we had befriended the yellow tiger cat who sat in the parking lot on sunny days.
This is why when I walked through the school parking lot and saw that the stray cat I had been feeding scraps from my lunch was watching over three little kittens, I felt a pang of guilt that I couldn’t take them home with me. I bought her some sausages so that she could at least feed her babies and fed her every morning and night. I wasn’t soon after I had seen the three kittens that there were only two kittens, and then just the one. It was the alarming decline in the parking lot kitten population that made me take action. I named the mother Lelouch after a popular anime character so that when I talked about her to the other teachers, my boss wouldn’t catch on to my secret cat rescue operation.
Lelouch was getting impatient with her remaining kitten and it wouldn’t be long before she abandoned him. So I came up with a plan. Lelouch was to far gone as a stray for me to be able to tame her, catch her, and give her to someone who wanted a cat. I could have tried, but I figured if I was ever able to catch that cat and release her into someone’s home, it would have to be someone I really hated since that cat would tear the place apart. Besides, Lelouch seemed to be able to manage well enough on her own.
The kitten, however, was rather runty looking and probably wouldn’t last a day once mommy ditched him. My mission was to catch the kitten and give it away. Finding someone who wanted a cat was easy enough. My friend Jane had been talking about getting one for months. I told her I would catch her this kitten if she was wiling to take it in as her pet, and she agreed. I hatched a secret plan in which I would simply grab the kitten as it ate out of my hand, but keeping secrets in a small school is hard and I ended up with another teacher watching my first attempt.
The all black kitten earned the nickname Makurokurosuke, Makro for short, because it looked like one of the soots from the Studio Ghibli movies. It came towards me without hesitation, I had almost grabbed it with my free hand when I realized that even if I caught it I would have no safe way of getting it back to my place and then handing it off to Jane. I sighed and let the kitten eat the bit of hot dog while Lelouch looked at me with suspicion. She had seen my free hand move and didn’t like where that was going.
The next day I created a cat carrier out of some cardboard and a lot of duct-tape. I figured it could hold a tiny kitten long enough for me to get it home. This time, when I went into the parking lot, two teachers came to watch. They watched me successfully bait Makro to my side of the parking lot fence and while he was eating, I used my free and to grab him.
I was rather surprised to find out that ninety percent of his time body was just fur. He escaped my loose grip rather quickly, an ran back behind the fence to his mother, who had the I-told-you-so look on her feline face.
“It’s going to be a lot harder now that the cat isn’t going to trust you any more,” one of the teachers said and she was right.
For the next couple of days, Lelouch and Makro sat behind the fence and wouldn’t come near the food until I left the parking lot. It took almost a week for them to come near the food with me standing about six feet away holding my make-shift box. That was when I decided that I would put the food into the box and when the kitten stepped into the box, I would flip the box over and the kitten would be trapped.
This time three teachers watched from the edge of the parking lot as I lured an unsuspecting kitten into a box. My plan almost worked. When the kitten was in the box, I flipped over the box to catch it, but when I did that, I accidently flipped the kitten too. Poor Makro went flying through the air and returned to his mother on the other side of the fence. Lelouch showed him no sympathy and gave me the I-told-you-so look as if my kitty capture plan was obviously incompetent.
“That cat’s on to me,” I told Jane when she asked me how the kitty capture was going. “The mom knows something is up, so she won’t come past the fence and the kitten doesn’t go to far from the mom. I’ll try again tomorrow. If it doesn’t work then, we might have to go together during the weekend and set a trap or something.”
My attempts to catch the cat had not gone unnoticed by our elderly neighbors who now looked at me with suspicion every time I was in the parking lot. It was only a matter of time before one of them decided to get rid of the cats on their own.
Since the impending kitten capture was one of the few things that broke the monotony of our school’s routine, all four teachers who were at the school the night of my final attempt to catch Makurokurosuke came. First, I tried the box. Then I tried grabbing the kitten with my hand and this time, when it climbed under the fence, I jumped over it. I caught Makro on the other side and just as I was lifting him to take him back over the fence and to the box, he jumped. The combination of both upwards movements launched the kitten in the air. He flew over my head and landed behind me. The moment of confusion was all Lelouch needed to get her kitten to follow her around the bend.
“Maybe you’ll have better luck tomorrow,” the other teachers said, sounding disappointed that there hadn’t been more of a show.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
The next day, armed with cat food, my makeshift box, duct-tape, hot dogs, and an over-size purse, Jane and I went to the parking lot. Lelouch saw us and stayed behind the fence. She knew all to well that something weird was going down. Makro was hungry and came to the other side of the fence, but very hesitantly. Jane waited in the far end of the parking lot as not to arouse suspicion from the cats. Instead she aroused the suspicion of our neighbors, who would walk by on occasion in slow motion to see what we were doing. One woman even swept the street in front of the parking lot, a rather odd and useless thing to do and not at all suspicious, in order to see what was happening.
With a lot of patience and three mini hot dogs and a can of cat food, Makro walked into the box. I waited until I was sure he was in the very back distracted by the food before I flipped the box over. This time I flipped it in a different direction and the plan worked. Makro was in the box and I was closing the top. But while I was holding the folds of the box together and trying to duct-tape the whole thing shut, Makro found a spot of weakness and flew out of the box. When he was midair, Jane made her move. She sprinted across the parking lot and caught him before he hit the ground.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said as she pinned the black ball of fur against her leg.
Makro hissed and started biting.
“I really hope you don’t have rabies,” Jane said as she held him down. She was not going to give up her kitten.
With some effort we got him into the box and tapped it closed. Lelouch got the rest of the hot dogs as a thank-you-apology for letting us steal her last surviving kitten. After that, we put the box into the oversized purse and tried to walk across town as inconspicuously as possible while carrying a meowing handbag.
The next day, I saw Lelouch sitting in the parking lot as usual, waiting for her breakfast. The look in her eyes told me that she wouldn’t trust me since she knew I was the one who had taken her baby, but it also told me she was willing to hang around if I gave her something to eat. So I ended up giving Lelouch another bag full of hot dogs out of guilt. She continues her existence as an alley cat, her appearances at the school becoming less and less frequent now that her kitten is gone. Makro, on the other hand, I see all the time. He got big and lazy, enjoying the good life as a house cat and Jane got more than she bargained for. Fleas, an unexpected present Makurokurosuke brought with him into her apartment.
