The Cat Who Saved Books
Sosuke Natsukawa
How It All Began
First things first, Grandpa’s gone.
The tale that follows is pretty outrageous, but he knows that one fact is absolutely real.
It’s as real as the sun rising in the morning, and his stomach rumbling with hunger at lunchtime. He’s tried closing his eyes, blocking his ears, pretending he doesn’t know anything, but his grandfather isn’t coming back.
Rintaro Natsuki stands there silent and still in the face of this harsh reality. On the outside, Rintaro seems like a calm, collected young man. But some of the people at the funeral find him eerie. He seems too composed for a high school student who has suddenly lost his closest family member. Sticking to the corner of the funeral parlor, Rintaro’s eyes stay locked on the portrait of his grandpa.
In truth, Rintaro isn’t calm and collected at all. The very idea of death is unfamiliar to him; he can’t make the connection between it and his grandfather, a serene man who seemed to exist in a different realm. He never thought death would come for Grandpa, who relished his simple, almost monotonous lifestyle. As Rintaro looks at him lying there, not breathing, he feels detached, as if he were watching a badly performed play.
Now, lying in his white coffin, his grandfather looks just the same as ever—as if nothing has happened at all; as if any moment he might just get up, mumble “Right then,” light the paraffin heater, and go make his usual cup of tea. It would have felt perfectly normal to Rintaro, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, the old man remains in his casket, his eyes closed and a solemn look on his face.
The chanting of the sutra drones on and mourners pass by in ones and twos, occasionally offering Rintaro their condolences.
First things first, Grandpa’s gone.
Reality gradually begins to take root in Rintaro’s heart. He finally manages to squeeze out a few words.
“This is messed up, Grandpa.”
But there’s no reply.
*
Rintaro Natsuki was an ordinary high school student. He was on the short side, pale with rather thick glasses, and rarely spoke. There was no subject at school he particularly excelled at, and he wasn’t good at sports. He was a completely average boy.
Rintaro’s parents had split up when he was just a baby. And when his mother passed away right around the time he started primary school, he went to live with his grandfather. It had been just the two of them ever since. Such living arrangements were a little unusual for your typical high school student, but to Rintaro it was just a normal part of his dull everyday existence.
But now that his grandfather had passed away, too, the story became more complicated. His death had been very sudden.
His grandfather was an early riser, but on that bitterly cold winter morning, he wasn’t in the kitchen like usual. Thinking it strange, Rintaro poked his head into the dim, tatami-matted room where his grandfather slept. The old man was still tucked inside his futon, having already breathed his last. He didn’t look as if he’d been in pain—he seemed to Rintaro more like a sculpture of a person sleeping. In the local doctor’s opinion, he’d most probably suffered a heart attack and died quickly.
“He passed away peacefully.”
If you combined the kanji character for “go” with the one for “live,” you got a strange-looking word meaning “to pass away.” Somehow seeing this word was what had shaken Rintaro the most; it struck him as out of place.
The doctor quickly grasped the difficulty of Rintaro’s family situation, and in no time an aunt from a distant city turned up.
A kindhearted and efficient woman, she dealt with everything from the paperwork related to the death certificate to organizing the funeral and all the other formalities. As he watched her, Rintaro didn’t forget to make sure he looked a bit sad, despite the lingering sense that none of this was real. But no matter how much he thought about it, he just couldn’t bring himself to sob in front of his grandfather’s funeral photo. It felt absurd to him, and it would be a lie. He could just imagine Grandpa grimacing in his casket, telling Rintaro to stop carrying on.
In the end, Rintaro bid farewell to his grandfather in total silence. All he had left now was a concerned aunt . . . and a bookshop.
Natsuki Books was a tiny secondhand bookshop on the edge of town. The shop didn’t lose enough money to be considered a liability, nor did it make enough to be considered a fortune. It wasn’t much of an inheritance.
*
“Hey, Natsuki, you’ve got some great books here.”
The male voice came from behind Rintaro. He didn’t turn around.
“Really?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the bookshelves in front of him. The shelves ran from the floor all the way up to the ceiling; they were filled with an impressive number of books.
There was Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Dumas and Stendhal, Faulkner and Hemingway, Golding . . . too many to name. Some of the greatest masterpieces this world has seen—majestic, dignified tomes stared down at Rintaro. They were all seasoned secondhand books, but none of them too used or worn, no doubt thanks to his grandfather’s loving care.
By Rintaro’s feet, the similarly seasoned paraffin heater glowed orange, but despite its best efforts, the shop was drafty. Still, Rintaro knew it wasn’t only the temperature that was making him feel chilly.
“So how much for these two together?”