Excerpt from The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, Philip Gabriel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Come on.

For a human, Satoru had a good intuitive sense of cat language and seemed to understand what I was saying. He looked puzzled for a moment, then followed me outside.

It was a bright, moonlit night, and the town lay still and quiet.

I leapt on to the bonnet of the silver van, thrilled to have regained the ability to jump, and then back on to the ground, where I rolled and scratched for a bit.

A car drove by and my tail shot up, the fear of being hit again ingrained in me now. Before I knew it, I was hiding behind Satoru's trousered legs, and he was gazing down at me, smiling.

I made one round of the neighbourhood with Satoru before returning to the apartment building. Outside the door of the stairway to the apartment on the second floor, I meowed. Open up.

I looked up at Satoru and saw he was smiling, but again in that tearful way.

'So you do want to come back, eh, Mr Cat?'

Right. Yeah. So open up.

'So you'll be my cat?'

Okay. But sometimes let's go out for a walk.

And so I became Satoru's cat.



'When I was a child, I had a cat that looked just like you.'

Satoru brought a photo album out of the cupboard.

'See?'

The album was full of photos of a cat. I know what they call people like this. Cat fanatics.

The cat in the photos did indeed resemble me. Both of us had an almost all-white body, the only spots of colour being on our face and tail. Two on our face; our tail black and bent. The only difference was in the angle of our bent tails. The tabby spots on our faces, though, were exactly alike.

'The two spots on its forehead were angled downwards, like the Chinese character hachi – eight – so I named him Hachi.'

If that's how he comes up with names, what on earth is he going to choose for me?

After hachi comes kyu – nine. What if he picked that?

'How about Nana?'

What? He's subtracting? I didn't see that coming.

'It hooks in the opposite direction from Hachi, and from the top it looks like nana – the number seven.'

He seemed to be talking about my tail now.

Now wait just a second. Isn't Nana a girl's name? I'm a full-fledged, hot-blooded male. In what universe does that make sense?

'You're okay with that, aren't you, Nana? It's a lucky name ? Lucky Seven and all that.'

I meowed, and Satoru squinted and tickled me under my chin.

'Do you like the name?'

Nope! But, well. Asking that while stroking my chin is playing foul. I purred in spite of myself.

'So you like it. Great.'

I told you already – I do not.

In the end, I missed my chance to undo the mistake (I mean, what's a cat going to do? The guy was cuddling me the whole time), and that's how I ended up being Nana.

'We'll have to move, won't we?'

His landlord didn't allow pets in the apartment, but he'd made an exception for me, just until I got back on my feet.

So Satoru moved with me to a new place in the same town. Going to all that trouble to move just for the sake of one cat – well, maybe I shouldn't say this, being a cat myself, but that was one fired-up cat lover.

And so began our new life together. Satoru was the perfect roommate for a cat, and I was the perfect roommate for a human.

We've got along really well, these past five years.




As a cat, I was now in the prime of life, and as Satoru was a little over thirty, I guess he was, too.

One day, Satoru patted my head apologetically.

'Nana, I'm sorry.'

It's okay, it's okay. No worries.

'I'm really sorry it's come to this.'

Excerpted from The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.