On the Road to Nekomachi
September 15, 2024
The narrator of Hagiwara Sakutarō’s novella Nekomachi (aka Cat Town) is a man with such a poor sense of direction that he often gets lost walking around his own neighbourhood. The story begins with an account of how one day after taking a wrong turn, he stumbles back onto his own street from a different direction than usual and thinks he has wandered into an entirely different (and more beautiful) city.
Later, while on vacation at a remote hot spring, he takes a walk through the forest and comes across an eerily beautiful town. All of a sudden, cats come pouring out of doors and windows and fill the streets. The whole world becomes a chaos of cats. As suddenly as they appeared, the cats vanish, and he realizes that he had actually circled his way back to the town nearest his hotel, where life continues as usual.
The other week, we had two friends staying in our home. One slept in the living room on a fold-out couch, and the other slept on an air mattress in the study. We slept in our bed in our bedroom. For decorum’s sake, we closed the door, which is usually left open all through the night. Around one o' clock, I awoke and sat up in bed. As I looked around me, I could not for the life of me determine where I was. I kept thinking I was on a work trip and was staying in a motel room. I could recognize all the separate elements of my bedroom — the framed poster of Kiki on the wall; the open closet with hanging shelf in the middle; the leafy plant on our bedside table — but I couldn’t determine what any of them meant. It felt like I could have been in one of a hundred different locations, from the aforementioned motel room to my childhood bedroom. I was entirely disoriented.
Such a minuscule change — closing the door that is usually left open — had been enough to entirely destroy my ability to recognize my environment. Since I couldn’t look out into the hallway and see the light peeking through from under the front door, I couldn’t place the room in its proper context.
This is the nature of closed doors. Right now, the door to my study is closed. I know that the rest of my house still exists beyond that door, but I am no longer connected to it. It is now a different place. This is true to a much greater extent when it comes to doors that lead outside. During my more home-bound days, I would often step out of my front door and be utterly shocked that there was an entire world out there. Sometimes I would step outside and think, “Wow, I could really go anywhere.”
A commute to work or school can become its own form of “inside.” Bound to the limits of the most direct path, constrained in one direction by the need to arrive at work on time, and in the other by the the desire to return home as quickly as possible, the rest of the world becomes unreal. It’s not somewhere that you go, and thus it becomes a place you can’t conceive of going. When it happens that you need to do an errand on the way home, this breaking through the boundary feels utterly odd, like stepping into a different world.
This can also be true when one’s evening or morning walk becomes too formalized. A route or collection of routes can also become an “inside,” disconnected from the rest of the world. This is what happens in the beginning of Nekomachi. The route of his regular walk is the narrator’s inside world. Outside of this route, he has absolutely no sense of place. Even when it comes to locations that are technically within this route, if they are presented from the wrong perspective, they seem foreign. It’s like seeing a set from a TV sitcom from the wrong angle. It’s just not the same place.
In the Cat Town, this decontextualization goes so far as to separate the narrator from reality itself. He is not only lost in space, but lost on a much deeper level. He seems to momentarily step into an entirely different realm. He can’t recognize the people of the town anymore; instead, he sees a flood of cats.
Our perception of reality is based on patterns and routines. We see the same types of objects so often that we can recognize them regardless of the perspective from which we are seeing them. As isolated images, a dog seen from the front is drastically different from a dog seen from the side. We only recognize both as the same type of entity because we have formed a conception of what a dog is, as a collection of impressions that a dog makes on our senses. When I look around at my bedroom in a normal state of mind, I don’t cognize each individual part. For the most part, I am filling in the image from what I remember my bedroom being like. When I become disoriented and attempt to recreate the bedroom via its individual parts, they fail to cohere into a recognizable whole.
This is why I can keep a box of items that need to be recycled in prominent display in my living room, and forget that they are items that need to be recycled. Eventually, they become a part of the room, and I no longer recognize them as an individual entity. I can lift the box to sweep around it, and put it back, without even really noticing that the box is there. This is also why we can lose items in plain sight, when they are not where they are supposed to be. Instead of actually seeing the room, we are instead merely seeing what the room is supposed to look like — i.e. what it tends to look like — which makes subtle differences tough to spot.
This is also why, despite seeing me for hours every day, my wife never notices when I shave. She only knows when I’ve gotten a haircut because she’s the one who cuts my hair.
Conversely, the connection between perception and habit can also explain why it’s often so surprising to find out what the ceiling of one’s workplace looks like. If you’re mostly focused on objects at eye level or on the ground, it’s rare that you’ll take the time to incorporate the ceiling into your impression of the space. Sometimes, one looks up and realizes that there is much more going on up there than one ever realized.
A nekomachi is a moment of lucidity so overwhelming that it throws our faculties of perception into complete disarray. In the above examples, the object we notice or don’t notice is but one part of a recognizable whole. This slight aberration causes us to momentarily re-cognize our surroundings, but since the majority of it remains familiar, this process is relatively simple. When one becomes so disoriented that one must attempt to reckon with all the impressions attacking one’s senses all at once, the mind goes haywire. Unable to fill in the blanks with anything resembling reality, the mind seems to grab whatever happens to be floating around. A recently heard rumour about a cat deity caused Nekomachi’s narrator to be overcome by the idea of cats — perhaps a fragment of a dream is what led me to believe myself in a motel room.
While these momentary departures from reality can be unpleasant and even frightening, they are also exhilarating. The contrast with our normal mode of life allows us to briefly step outside of the shell formed by habit, and view things as they are, rather than what they seem to be. After riding around in a roller coaster, there is a brief period where walking on the ground feels weird. Walking on the ground is weird, and it’s important to realize this sometimes. All of the things we do are weird; they only seem normal because we do them so often, and don’t do other things instead.
The road to Nekomachi is difficult to find; you won’t come across it merely by looking. It is a road that can only be wandered onto absent-mindedly — and I mean that in the most literal sense. The world instantly shifts, as if you’ve pivoted from one track to another; at the end of this new track lies the Nekomachi. Do not be afraid; the disruption is only temporary. You’ll be back home before you know it.
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