Violence and Metaphysics and Cats

The article addresses the problem of cat cruelty represented in Post-war and Contemporary Japanese Literature, discussing it against the background of the attitude toward cats in the West and in Japan before the WWII. I give numerous examples of violence against cats in Japanese fiction written between 1945 and 2020 but I focus in particular, on the one hand, on a scandal involving the writer Bando Masako who admitted in an essay published by Nihon Keizai Shinbun that she kills kittens precisely because she loves cats, and on the other, on a short text by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, titled „Cats and Metaphysics“. The analyses show that even though there are significant and irreducible cultural differences cat cruelty throughout the ages shares a common motive, a motive I see as metaphysical, that has to do with man’s finitude facing what the human being cannot thoroughly understand. In the factual and real violence against cats there is already a fictional moment involved, a motive that makes the distinction between „real“ and „literary“ cats difficult. It is this motive that reveals most of the attempts to legitimize violence against cats as unacceptable. Violence poses a metaphysical question concerning the epistemological and ontological finitude of the human being and at the same time attempts to be the answer to that question at the point where the question cannot be answered. As a response violence is irresponsible.