If Cats Disappeared From the World

My usual format is to start writing a review 80% or so into the book to see if I can predict the ending and to provide some real-time commentary.  This book or booklet, this novel or novella, is so short that I finished it while on my one-hour bike workout.  The premise of the book is told to us at the outset.   The narrator, an unnamed postman, is diagnosed with late-stage cancer and has a very short time to live.  This time is made even shorter when the Devil visits him and tells him he has one day to live and offers to extend his life by a day if he agrees to remove certain items from all of Earth.  

The plot is set up as a tear jerker as it is a sad and reflective tale of the meaning of life and what is truly important.  For our postman the answer is an ex-girlfriend, memories of his mom who also died of cancer and reconciling with his father.  The last scene in the book is of him personally delivering this story to his father as a final act of reconciliation and we imagine him making peace.  However, most of all it is his cat Cabbage.  Cabbage was the successor cat to Lettuce who also died of cancer.  Our narrator has no issue with getting rid of chocolate (although the Devil nixed that one), phones, and movies however he draws the line with cats.  Choosing his own death over that of cats.  

Even as someone who doesn't own cats, or ever had a meaningful pet, there is something extra-heroic about choosing your own death to spare others.  Heroes in life and fiction come to mind - Joan of Arc, Thomas More, Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities, Spock in Wrath of Khan to name a few.  I'm not suggesting our unnamed postman is the same - there is a difference.  In this story the hero was going to die and he made a choice to save himself at the expense of others.  In the true martyr case they were giving up their perfectly healthy lives to save others.  This leads to a reasonable charge of the narrator being selfish.  After all is his life, is any one life worth the toll it would extract on everyone else.  

Having said that there is sadness in death and there is sadness in saying goodbye.  There is sadness in sacrificing yourself to save others human or not no matter the circumstances.  This was a sad short book.  And at the end there was redemption of an otherwise ordinary life.   His death, given the circumstances, is the best outcome for the rest of us.  Perhaps there is a lesson in that for all of us, that in the end, for each of us, our death is what is best.  And perhaps that recognition is the most sad aspect of this book.  

I'll end with one other quick observation which is that it didn't go unnoticed that the Japanese narrator made the Devil an American doeppelganger with classic accoutrements such as Ray Bans and tacky Hawaiian shirts.  Justified?