Fudoki by Kij Johnson

nights grew colder. The cold did not bother her much, for her fur grew denser, and her foot-pads were thick. The rain was more irksome; she had never liked wet feet and fur. Worse, it drove the squirrels and other small things under cover where she could not reach them. Except for flies and fleas (which are always with us), most insects vanished altogether. She developed a taste for cooked fish, which could be stolen from bowls, if one was clever.
     
     
    Cooked fish: I see now why I chose that rather than “cooked rice” or “buckwheat noodles” or “duck meat.” I have been writing on the veranda again, for the weather is scorchingly hot, which is to say just barely warm enough for my old bones, and Shigeko and several other women are bringing a little table and series of trays. I suppose I smelled the fish cooking (it is hake ), though I was absorbed in what I wrote.
    This is hardly a profound reason to prefer “cooked fish” to all the other options. I have always assumed that the lady Murasaki weighed every word in her monogatari tale of Genji with the focus I might have applied to the making of a water-clock, where a badly shaped element may destroy all. But perhaps it is not like this: perhaps Murasaki selected Genji’s robe combinations and the foods and trees for just such minor and immediate reasons, because she looked up from her brush and saw someone in cherry-shaded robes, and thought, That’s lovely. I’ll use that.
    I wish my half-brother (Shirakawa, I must remember that this is his name now!) were still alive, so that I could share this thought with him. I think he would have been amused. No, I will not think of him just now—it hurts too much, and there is already enough pain for one day, in my chest and bones.
    Cooked fish are not lovely, not even this cooked fish, with its elegant garnish of gromwell, now drooping dispiritedly. But they are necessary. “More necessary than words,” says Shigeko, who tells me that the fish is growing cold.
     
     
    There was an inn, not so far from the Omi-Owari border shrine. The tortoiseshell came to it one afternoon, when the sky was the color of old lead and had been weeping continuously since the night before, with an icy relentlessness that hinted at snow. She’d slept in an outbuilding at a little farm until an officious dog had rousted her, howling curses as she loped into the dusk. After catching an adolescent rabbit, she’d buried herself as deep as she could crawl into a mound of rice straw heaped around the base of an ancient and revered pine. But by midmorning, the dragon’s hour, a drip found her and she heaved herself from the straw and moved on. She was soaked to the skin, and splashed to her belly with sandy dirt when she came to the inn, which squatted between rice fields filled with wet stubble and the mulberry trees that crept up the hill to the north.
    It was an ordinary inn: which is to say, a farmhouse with rather more room divisions than is usual. The dirt-floored area was smaller than it would have been, and the raised section larger. Mats for sleeping were rolled up in a corner, beside an empty curtain-stand much too beautiful to be of local manufacture. This inn also grew silk when it was time, so boards had been laid on the horizontal beams overhead, giving an unsettling low flatness to the rooms.
    It was special in one thing, that it had a cat. Remember, this is not so many years since the first cats came to the Eight Islands. Most remained in the capital, whence they spread slowly across the home provinces, like spilled syrup in cold weather. Some cats had come farther than that, though generally not voluntarily. Someone from the country saw a cat stalking vermin while he was visiting the city, or elsewhere. Inflamed with a sense of the possibilities (no mice ever again!), the hick purchased the cat from an enterprising child, or captured one behind an inn somewhere, then stuffed his prize into a closed basket and carried it