2025-10-26: A Story About Cats

• Cutscene: A Story About Cats
• Cast: Tamaki Uchida, Reiko Akanezawa, Ideo Hazama
• Where: Karukozaka High School, Tokyo/Shinjuku Ward
• OOC Date: 2025-10-26
• IC Date: Autumn, 2007
• Summary: The contents of a sticker-covered binder that Tamaki keeps on her shelf at work. A story from her high-school days.

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Tamaki’s desk at the Kuzunoha Detective Agency is mostly tidy. A few non-work-related objects lay strewn to one side of her desk, where one may typically keep family photos or other keepsakes as a little display of customization.

• A single empty can of coffee has remained there for months: while she regularly drinks canned coffee, she hasn’t seen fit to throw this one out.
• A case for a compact disc sits on her desk: the cover indicates that it’s a musical album and prominently displays the tracklist overlaid against an image of clouds, mountain peaks rising out of an otherwise flooded earth, and a rainbow.
• A DVD volume of an old show from the early ‘90s: produced in America, part detective procedural, part dream-logic and absurdity-fuelled paranormal thriller. It’s the first season of Mirrored Mountains, where citizens of a small town lived cheerfully while their doppelgangers would commit mischief and sow chaos. Notably, there was once a prominent ad campaign in Japan where the actor for the show’s government investigator protagonist would drink the same brand of canned coffee as the empty can she keeps on her desk.
• A poster advertising an old retro console game, similar in genre to Drake Adventure, but lesser known. A celebrated hero knight embarks on a quest to slay the dragon residing on the moon, but leaves chaos in his wake, and instead, the protagonist character is an architect tasked with rebuilding the towns where the knight’s destructive battles have taken place.
• A miniature chess set. No game is actively being played on it; all the pieces are in their starting positions.

The shelf behind her desk mostly contains case files, though the upper-left shelf is the exception to this. Here, Tamaki appears to keep a small collection of several Edo- and Meiji- works of literature. Several of these volumes were apparently purchased from the Cardboard Dragon: it appears Tamaki is a bit of a repeat customer.

In addition, this part of the shelf contains a binder covered in lucky cat stickers, reminiscent of the statue by the agency’s doors. If one were to become curious enough to peruse the contents of this folder, they would find that it contains a printed manuscript of her amateur effort at creative writing, dated sometime in 2008. Weird.

Below is a basic retelling of the narrative in the tale she’s crafted:

A long time ago, at the base of a mountain, there was once a village of people and cats. The people were proud and thought highly of themselves. Their rulers boasted of their wisdom, and their warriors boasted of their strength, but both would ignore the pleas of the farmers and merchants for aid in times of famine or in disputes among the villagers. The farmers and merchants thought poorly of their lot in life, but they thought of themselves as more fortunate than the lowly cats that resided in the village.

In the eyes of even the lowliest scoundrel and lowborn thief in that village, a cat deserved even less than they did. They were fed last. They were not given housing. They were not regularly afforded comfort and affection. They had to rely on the occasional kindness from the humans of the village to even survive. Their nobility handed the cats their leftover scraps from dinner, and yet thought of themselves as the most magnanimous person across the land.

There was a married couple in this village, and they had a baby daughter without incident. The husband was one of the most cruel and cowardly of the village’s warriors, and a vengeful spirit from the mountain had cursed his family line. Their next child, their son, was the unfortunate one to endure this curse: his fellow humans would instead see him as a cat and treat him as such. Horrified by this, the wife fled home with their daughter, leaving the boy in the care of his father.

This was no fault of the boy’s, of course. People and cats have many of the same needs and desires. The boy asked to be fed, but was given scraps.The boy fell in love, but the object of his affection openly showed her disgust for him: who would marry a mere cat? The boy wished for a friend, but other children and adults openly mocked him as if he wasn’t there. The boy wished for love from his father, but received only insults and beatings. For years, the boy wished for even the slightest shred of affection, the smallest sign that someone saw him as their equal, and not the cat he had been cursed to be perceived as through no fault of his own.

On exceedingly rare occasions, the boy received at least this much. The boy’s mother sought him out again and took him home, away from the care of his father. There, he lived with his mother and sister, who still treated him with trepidation, but they thought they had done a good deed by taking him away from his father. They had done something necessary, but insufficient. A kind shrine maiden would regularly feed him, as she does with all cats, but her duties would not permit her to focus all of her attention on this one cat of many. It was something, but it was not enough.

Over time, the boy grew more dissatisfied and hateful. Feeling that the boy was owed the truth, his mother told him what had happened to his father and how he was cursed. Upon hearing this, he felt a kinship with the spirit who had cursed his father and the rest of his family line. If the villagers thought he was a cat, he would embrace his nature as a cat, and seek the advice of the spirit on the mountain. The spirit’s dark heart smiled, for this was their plan all along, and they sang for the boy. The spirit’s song told of a spell that would summon the worst spirits of the underworld to the surface so they would then eternally torment the village with fates worse than death. The sins the villagers had committed would come crashing back down on their own heads and bury them with despair! They would suffer the same pain they had inflicted on him, a thousand times over! This was the culmination of the sense of vengefulness that the spirit had planted in the boy since the day it had cursed his father.

Overjoyed at this prospect, with only despair and malice left in his heart, the boy journeyed to the top of the mountain and recited this spell. It did not summon spirits to the surface, at least not so directly, but instead, it had plunged the mountain and the village into the depths of the underworld. The boy fully transformed into a malevolent cat spirit, a nekomata. He stood on two legs and walked and spoke like a human, but had otherwise catlike features. He now truly had the paws and face and fur of a cat. His tail had split into two, severed by the torment that the village had put him through.

Monsters now openly roamed the village streets and caused havoc the likes of which not even the first villagers had ever known. The people flew into a panic. The boasting warriors did not venture out to fight, but huddled within their barracks. The rulers isolated themselves in their palaces, even though they would beg anyone who passed by to please do something about the village’s fate.

The notion of nobility dissolved, and at least for some time, the people banded together to take care of each other in this time of distress, villagers and cats alike. While this brought the residents of the village closer and they all became a little kinder to each other, it was not enough, and it would not undo the pain the nekomata had felt as a human. Someone would have to venture up the mountain path in order to soothe the nekomata’s spirit.

The shrine maiden from before took it upon herself to make this journey. Along the way, she met the boy’s sister, who felt remorse for not having done enough for her brother. They took the armor and weapons that the warriors were clearly not using and would attempt the arduous climb together.

Underworld spirits had established checkpoints along the mountain path. Only those with properly refined souls would be able to climb to the top. Each checkpoint served as a trial.

Only those with proper humility could proceed beyond the entrance to the mountain pass, as they had to bow while they uttered the nekomata’s praises.

Only those with a generous heart could proceed past the horde of starving wild mountain cats, who would tear travellers apart if they did not relinquish all of their rations.

Only those with great diligence could proceed past the fire spirits who demanded for travellers to unceasingly work for three days and three nights to build them large enough shelter to weather an incoming storm.

Only those without hearts clouded by envy could defeat the apparitions that separated groups of travellers and taunted them with visions of how their companions had abandoned them for another.

Only those without greed could proceed past the procession of treasures, as these served as monsters’ disguises and bite off the limbs of those who dared to plunder this chamber.

At the top of the mountain was a recreation of the village below, empty of inhabitants. The nekomata had made it in preparation for any travellers to reside in who could make it up this far, as they would have proven his pessimism wrong. It was there where he planned to grant anyone who succeeds at the trials their just reward: a final grave and an end to their torment. They would reside in the empty village as a rotting corpse, finally at peace.

Anyone who perished in this realm – in the village at the base, the mountain pass, or the empty village at the top – would have their spirits travel to a distant divine river, as they normally do. However, because the nekomata’s spell had warped the natural way of things, as one were to offer their coins to the ferryman to let them cross over, the ferryman would instead close the offered palm and tell them to turn back and return to their torment.

The shrine maiden and the boy’s sister stumbled many times in their journey, for no one’s heart begins as pure as the trials demanded. They fell in battle. They failed the trials. The ferryman became a familiar face to them. Each time they treated their own lives and the lives of others with respect, their souls grew stronger. Each time they tried to climb guided instead by foolishness and callousness, their souls grew weaker. Despite the setbacks they faced, they persisted, and eventually they managed to reach the empty village at the top.

The nekomata was ready to reward them by ending their torment and burying them in the empty village’s graveyard. However, the sister’s remorse spilled over and she rushed to the boy to embrace him as her tears spilled onto her cheeks. She promised to never leave him, that he would always have her so he wouldn’t be alone.

So moved was he by this gesture, the malice in the nekomata’s heart faded away. The spell he had cast was broken. He gave up on his plans to kill the shrine maiden and his sister. The empty village and the trials would remain in the underworld below, but the mountain and the village at the base would return to the surface. The siblings remained in the underworld.

The shrine maiden, having performed her duties to undo the effects of the spell, quietly returned to the surface along with the rest of the village. Whenever someone asks her about her journey, to this day, she only utters cryptic nonsense alongside advice that one should be even kinder to cats than she is.

One question still lingers in her mind: what of the spirit which cursed and tempted the boy? It has gone unanswered in her years on this earth, and it might never be answered. All it can do is haunt her. The shrine maiden keeps her silence so that no one else may rediscover the spirit and once again cast the same spell.