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For the cats, it was not sure that their human represented a single
person: rather a kind of flock or herd, toward which they always
came curiously to verify if it still appeared the same way, vertical
or horizontal, here the feet, there the head. For the owl, perhaps we
were great fuzzy shadows, not hostile, but enigmatic. While she
fought to regain her breath, while the dizziness of death entered
her head for the first time, her eyes said « Shadow, you are killing
me, shadow, you are abandoning me »; and her sharp claws, fatal
to rodents, clenched around your finger in a final convulsion. Your
finger remained blue for weeks, blue like the Russian cat, blue like
the Tozai Line, and you bore that sign a long time, slow to fade,
like remorse.

Others this evening may drink to the death of kings, to the death
of empires. In Shinjuku we drink to the death of cats and owls. What
could be more natural? A quarter hour’s walk away, without leaving
Shinjuku, we would come to the temple of Ji Cho In, in Nishi Ochiai,
where they pray for all the cats of the world. A superb maneki neko
watches over the door of the sanctuary: the greeting cat, the mascot
of knowing merchants and attentive prostitutes. For some slight
offering the monk will unveil the statues of cats -the one donated
in the sixteenth century by a warlord whose path had been crossed
by a black cat (and who, rather than fearing an ill omen like an
ignorant Westerner, followed the cat to a strategic position that
brought victory) -the one donated in the seventeenth century by a