The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles by Kij Johnson
My rating: 4/5 cats
at 17 “pages,” this is one of the longest tor shorts i have found. being as long as it is, it also has the benefit of having several illustrations throughout, and who doesn’t like pictures? like this one:
and this one:
i am a sucker for a good “epic animal adventure,” particularly those involving cats. Tailchaser’s Song, Rama, the Gypsy Cat, The Incredible Journey—all of these were favorites of mine when i was little, read over and over again and completely owning my wee heart.
this one definitely deserves to be shelved alongside those childhood faves, despite being so much shorter and somewhat quieter in its telling.
small cat lives in the gardens of an abandoned and decaying old house in japan, along with a number of other cats. together, their group makes up its own fudoki; a shared mythology developed by cats who band together—their individual stories and pasts mashed up into a collective narrative that is passed down and expanded from one generation to the next. small cat is young and has not yet earned a grander name, but she absorbs the existing fudoki and yearns to make a name for herself that will contribute and enrich the larger oral tapestry.
She knew she would have a story worth telling someday.
after an earthquake and subsequent fire destroys their home and the cats scatter, small cat is left on her own, with no protection, and with the burden of the fudoki on her tiny cat-shoulders.
The stories were all she had left. But the stories were not enough without the garden and the other cats. They were just a list. If everyone and everything was gone, did she even have a home? She could not help the cry of sadness that escaped her.
It was her fudoki now, hers alone. She had to find a way to make it continue.
her favorite tale in the fudoki had always been the story of the cat from the north, a distant relation who had joined small cat’s fudoki from far away, whose adventures were unlike any other—wild, foreign, alluring. small cat decides to go north herself, to find the cat from the north’s people and join them.
The Cat From The North must have come from somewhere, before she became part of Small Cat’s fudoki. And if she came from somewhere, Small Cat could go there. There would be cats, and they would have to accept her—they would have to accept a fudoki that included one of their own.
this is the story of her journey, the animals and humans she meets along the way, the dangers and comforts and adventures she experiences as she does indeed make a name for herself, very far from where she began.
it’s a great story with a rich mythology and really makes me want to read the full-length Fudoki.
and more of these wonderful tor shorts.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2009/07/th…
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