If only Cats could Speak Japanese

For a few weeks, Lorna Glover had been dating Felipe Perez, a boy from the office where she worked. But she had become perplexed. She could not work out what his feelings for her were. Her friend, Sonya, had suggested that she consult the Emotional Detective Agency in Baker Street, who specialize in just this type of situation.

It was Thursday lunchtime and Lorna had an extended lunch break of a few hours. She decided to take the opportunity to check out the Agency. When she arrived in Baker Street, she found a queue starting at the Agency’s front door and extending along the pavement for about twenty yards. The queue contained a mixture of both men and women. Lorna joined the back of the queue and over the next two hours she gradually edged her way towards the Agency’s front door. At last, she found herself standing in the reception area, at the head of the queue.

There was a long corridor leading into the heart of the building, and on either side of the corridor, doors opened into it. Occasionally, a client would reappear from one of these doors, sometimes a man and sometimes a woman, but they would always be accompanied by another person who seemed to work for the Agency.

These Agency workers always wore a nondescript overcoat and plain shoes. Their facial features were always attractive in some way, but Lorna could not tell if they were male or female. They were rather like the models who might appear in a glossy fashion magazine. The scene might be set in a trendy coffee shop with sofas and armchairs snuggled around coffee tables, and the room would be populated by models who all had attractive features, but their gender differences had been blurred, as though air-brushed out by the photo editor.

These workers accompanied the clients through the Agency’s front door and appeared to follow them back out into their everyday lives.

It was Lorna’s turn and she was taken along the corridor and directed to enter one of the doors. She found herself in a room furnished with two easy chairs, a coat stand, and not much else. Sat in one of the chairs was a person who was introduced to her as Agent Melancholy.

Agent Melancholy had attractive features and long hair, but, again, Lorna was not sure whether Melancholy was a man or a woman. The agent stood up, greeted her in a soft voice and indicated for her to sit in the other easy chair. While the agent was standing, with no overcoat on, Lorna took the opportunity to quickly scan their body, looking for any bulges that might give away their sex, but she could not detect any. They both sat down.

Lorna said, “I’ve heard that you can detect the emotional life in men.”

Agent Melancholy said, in a soft voice, “Ah, yes, we do our best. But you have to understand that this is the final frontier of human discovery. With some men, detecting the emotional life in them is like trying to prove that, if a cat could speak, it would be able to learn Japanese. How does one go about doing that? First of all, have you ever heard a cat speak?”

“No, I haven’t”

“Well, there you are. So how do you know whether it could learn Japanese or not?”

Lorna said, quite truthfully, “I can’t see how you could tell.” She was beginning to feel relaxed. She sank into the easy chair. There was something simple and straightforward about Agent Melancholy and she felt that, though the agent’s questions seemed a bit strange, she was able to easily answer them.

Melancholy said, “And this is your experience of men?”

She said, “With most of them. Well, no, with pretty much all of them.”

“I see,” said Melancholy. “So you want us to find out whether—supposing that your man were a cat—whether or not he would be capable of speaking Japanese?”

Lorna said, “I don’t want him to speak Japanese; I just want him to speak to me.”

“Japanese would be a first step though?”

“Do you think you could get him to speak Japanese?”

“I doubt it; we’re speaking metaphorically, you understand.”

Lorna said, “Yes, I see. Well, no. No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Agent Melancholy told her, “Well, you see, this is the first problem. Do you know what the problem is?”

Lorna said, “I want to know if he cares for me at all.”

“No, that’s what you want to know. That’s not what the problem is.”

“So, what’s the problem then?”

“It’s not really possible for me to tell you that.”

“Why not? Are you not allowed to?”

“No, I’m not able to. It just isn’t possible.”

“But isn’t that your job?”

Melancholy told her, “No. If we take our metaphorical Japanese-speaking cat, for example. Suppose that you wanted to get to a particular street in Tokyo and you stopped to ask the cat directions. If the cat started speaking Japanese to you, and even gesticulated with its paws, could you understand its directions?”

Lorna thought for a moment and then said, “I think I would have a rough idea, because I would see the direction it was pointing in.”

“But what if it was saying ‘Don’t, whatever you do, go in that direction because it is the wrong direction’?”

“Well, then I’d get completely lost.”

Agent Melancholy said, “Exactly! So, imagine that you were travelling along a road and you came to a fork in the road and didn’t know which way to go, and then you noticed me sitting beside the road. You approached me to ask me directions (just as you have done today), but at that moment, I transformed into a cat who was very learned but could only speak Japanese. You asked me for directions. I might well have been able to then recite two hours of finely honed Japanese verse to you. But you would still be lost, because you could not understand a word of Japanese. Do you see?”

Lorna said, in her own simple way, “Well, couldn’t you just tell me in English?”

“But perhaps the cat cannot speak English. It can only speak Japanese.”

Lorna said, now a little impatiently, “But I’m not interested in that cat. I just want to know if Felipe feels anything for me.”

Melancholy said, “I see.” He crossed his arms and held his chin with his right hand for a moment. He watched Lorna whilst seeming to perform some sort of calculation in his head. He then agreed to take on her case. He put on his nondescript overcoat and accompanied her back to her workplace. On the way, he told her, “Just imagine that I am not here. I will follow you for a few days and gather the clues. I might whisper my observations into your ear from time to time, but I will speak so softly that no-one else will hear.”

Lorna had no objections. She just wanted the riddle to be solved—did Felipe have any feelings for her, or not?

Lorna worked in an open-plan office. She sat at her desk and Melancholy sat beside her. She whispered, “That’s Felipe, over there.”

Felipe Perez’s desk was on the other side of the office, about twenty yards to the left of her desk. Their desks faced in the same direction and Felipe’s was a few yards ahead of hers, so that if he glanced over his right shoulder, they could see each other. Felipe’s father was Spanish and his mother Chinese and Felipe seemed to have inherited all the best traits from both his parents, in both looks and personality. He had long black hair, a dark Mediterranean complexion and dark, alluring eyes. There was a mystique that seemed to surround him; he would have to do nothing more than merely enter a room to cause every eye in the room to turn towards him, like compass needles seeking north.

While she had been walking back to the office, she had given Agent Melancholy the details of her brief relationship with Felipe. They had started dating a few weeks before. They had met a few times at the coffee machine during their breaks, had started chatting, then sending each other messages on the internal mail system, and then they had arranged a date. In the following two weeks, they had had sex twice at Lorna’s flat, but then she had started to notice that he did not seem to be saying the right things to her, nor messaging her anymore at the office, and then it had occurred to her that he had never even told her that he was attracted to her.

At her desk, she whispered to Melancholy, “So, you see, I’ve got no idea what his intensions are and I don’t know if he’s even attracted to me.”

Melancholy whispered, “Yes, I do see the problem. And you know, if you were to simply ask him: ‘Felipe, are you attracted to me?’ he’d be likely to say something like, ‘Well, I slept with you, didn’t I?’ which would not answer your question at all. Because you already know that he slept with you——” and here, Melancholy looked at her in a doubtful, questioning way and whispered, “That is, unless it was so uneventful that it was difficult for you to notice him in bed with you——?”

Lorna whispered, “Oh, no! it was quite eventful!”

Melancholy whispered, “Good. So, his answer would not really be saying anything. So, whatever he’s likely to say, you will still be left to solve this riddle by yourself. This is the problem that we face.”

Lorna started tapping on her keyboard and as she did so, she whispered, “Well, Melancholy, I’m glad I’ve got you here to help me.”

Two hours later, she had still not received any messages from Felipe. She whispered, “He knows I’m here; why doesn’t he message me?”

Agent Melancholy whispered, “There are endless possibilities.”

She whispered, “It’s always left to me to contact him. If I don’t message him, he doesn’t message me. So, how do I know that he wants me to message him?”

Melancholy explained that some men simply do not know what to say, even in the simplest of social situations, and that it was like a great riddle to them—what were they supposed to say?—so that silence did not necessarily mean that he was not interested in her. And Agent Melancholy helpfully added: “You see, if that metaphorical cat said something to you in Japanese, and you didn’t respond, the cat might then have thought that you weren’t interested. But it may have been the case that you were extremely interested, only you didn’t understand Japanese. Do you see?”

Lorna’s head was starting to spin. She simply got on with her work.

One hour later, she noticed Felipe getting up from his desk and leaving the office. She whispered, in a told-you-so tone, “Well, there you are. He’s not interested!”

Melancholy whispered, “But perhaps he thinks you’re not interested in him, so he’s given up and is looking elsewhere.”

Lorna whispered, “You mean, he’s got a date with someone else?”

“He might have. Because your silence might have told him that you’re not interested, so he might have given up on you. The riddle works both ways.”

“But I still want him.”

“But how does he know that? He might think that you’re not interested. So, he might be interested in you and he might not. The fact that he’s going home without having sent you a message, doesn’t prove anything.”

Lorna shouted, “But how do I know!”

Her manager looked at her with concern.

She left the office with Melancholy.

On their way back to Lorna’s flat, they passed by the Agency’s offices in Baker Street. There was an even longer queue than before, with a good many men standing in line.

Lorna asked, “Do men have this problem as well?”

Melancholy told her, “We get a lot of men clients. Most of them are gay. Can you imagine how much more difficult these sorts of problems are when both parties are men?”

Lorna said, “No. Can it be any harder?”

Melancholy told her, “Oh, yes. They have so much difficulty speaking that they can’t even tell us what they want to know. They just come in and sit down and we have to guess—in much the same way that they have to guess whether or not their man is interested in them.”

Lorna thought that she was starting to understand what Melancholy was saying, but then Melancholy went on: “With many men, it’s as though their guardian angel were a librarian. And I often imagine a librarian following them around and whenever they were about to say anything, the librarian would sternly tell them, “No speaking!” and they would hear this rebuke from somewhere within their own head and then stop saying whatever it was they were about to say.”

Lorna saw a man walking towards them along the street. She tried to imagine a librarian walking behind him. The man looked up and started to smile, but then stopped, and then looked away as they passed each other. Lorna looked at the space behind him and scowled at the imaginary librarian.

Melancholy went on: “Yes, I sometimes want to round up all librarians and ship them out to an island and tell them that in order for them to escape, they must make so much noise that their words would cut down enough trees to make themselves a boat with.”

Lorna nodded and said “Yes,” and as they walked on along the pavement she felt proud with herself for having understood what Melancholy had said. However, she quickly dismissed the thought, lest she discovered that, in fact, she really had no idea what he was talking about.

The next morning in the office, Lorna opened her empty mailbox. She looked over to Felipe at his desk. Felipe glanced at her and smiled. She whispered to Melancholy, “What does that mean? He smiled. It could mean anything. How am I supposed to know what that means?”

Melancholy explained all the possibilities: It could mean that he was attracted to her and was longing to see her again; or it could mean that he had only ever wanted a brief encounter with her and his smile was now saying “Sorry I don’t want to see you again;” or it could mean that he had originally thought that they could have been partners but that after he had spent some time in her company he had decided that he could not bare to see her again, for whatever reason—and there were an endless number of possible reasons for this type of thing, some easily remedied, some not—and Agent Melancholy went on listing other possible meanings for Felipe’s simple smile.

Lorna whispered, in a pleading tone, “But I just want to know which one; what does it mean——?”

Three hours later, Lorna could take the silence no more and, under instructions from Melancholy, she sent a simple message to Felipe, inviting him to meet her for a drink that evening. Felipe accepted.

Later at the bar, they chatted happily for two hours, then went to Lorna’s flat. Agent Melancholy accompanied them to her bedroom, placed a chair beside her bed, sat there and carefully watched them having sex. Everything seemed in order.

On Saturday morning, Felipe left. Thirty seven minutes later, Lorna started watching her phone, waiting for a text message from him. She got dressed and placed her phone in her kitchen, in an attempt to ignore it. She returned to it at least once every hour for the remainder of the day.

By six pm, she could take the turmoil no longer. She had to know, one way or the other, so, under instruction from Melancholy, she sent a simple text message to Felipe saying that she had enjoyed the night and that she was looking forward to seeing him again. She placed her phone in a cupboard in the kitchen, so that she would not be listening out for it’s incoming-text alert. She sat in her living room and started imagining the sound of her phone’s incoming-text alert. She tried doing other things and even tried playing some music loudly, to block out this sound in her mind, but every few minutes, she would still hear in her mind the sound of her phone calling out to her. Twice every hour, she returned to the kitchen and opened the cupboard, only to find that she had no new messages. By eleven o’clock on Saturday evening, she had still not received a reply from him. She told Melancholy, who now seemed like her constant companion, “Well, that’s it. He obviously doesn’t care.”

Melancholy told her all the various explanations for his silence, and all the possible meanings, one of those being that he did indeed have all the right feelings for her, but that he simply did not know what to say. He told Lorna, “You see, detecting the emotional life in men, is rather like solving a crime—Is he interested or not? Does he care or not? Does he want to go on seeing you, or not?—this is the riddle. It’s tempting to think that some men are a sub-species who do not seem to possess the faculty of speech; at least, not in the way that other people think of the human faculty of speech. With men like this, you are left to figure out everything for yourself. This, Lorna, is the sad truth of the matter.”

Lorna burst into tears, went to bed, exhausted, and slept solidly.

On Sunday, Lorna woke, tried to not think about her phone lying their in the kitchen cupboard, but could not put it out of her mind. She went to the kitchen, opened the cupboard and found that there had still been no reply. This same routine continued for much of Sunday, and by the evening, she told Melancholy that she could not face going into work on Monday, that Felipe would just sit there all day in silence, and that it was too much for her to cope with. She had decided to leave her job; she would not go back to that office again.

Melancholy told her, “Or you could stop trying to prove that a cat can speak Japanese.”

She asked, “What do you mean?”

“Why not just accept that the cat can speak Japanese, then you would not need proof of that, and you may then become happy. But if your happiness relies on that proof, it is never going to happen. The cat cannot even speak. Don’t look for proof that it could learn Japanese.”

By then, it was ten o’clock in the evening and Lorna was in bed, exhausted again. She told Melancholy, “But I need to know if he feels anything for me.”

Melancholy whispered into her ear, “The cat cannot even speak.”

She started to doze.

Melancholy whispered, “Just accept that it could learn Japanese.”

She was then drifting off to sleep, and she could only distantly hear Melancholy’s whispering: “But don’t look for proof. It will not come. It can not come. The cat cannot even speak.”

When she woke the next morning, Agent Melancholy was not there. Her sleep had been a torrent of dreams, but somehow her head seemed clear. It seemed empty, and even a little tender. Her brain felt like the sore muscle of an arm that had spent the whole night bailing out a sinking boat.

She breakfasted and went to work. She did not attempt to message Felipe again. She did not even acknowledge him. She felt calm and grounded. She felt undisturbed. For the moment, she was not interested in men.

Over the next few weeks, she only felt one emotion. Whenever she saw a cat in the street, she felt the desire to run over to it and kick it.

For four weeks, her life was uncomplicated, calm, though she was aware of a growing void within her. Then on the Monday morning of the fifth week, she was standing at the coffee machine in the office. She filled her cup, replace the jug, and looked up into the eyes of Eddie, a new member of staff. The blueness of his eyes seemed to pour down into her and begin filling up that void.

Two and a half weeks later, she would come to regret what she did next.

She smiled at him.

 

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