Yuki the Cat

The Mukade and the Onsen

I don't know how cats do it.
Stay inside all day. Prowl the same four rooms over and over again. Content themselves with only as much adventure as they can get staring out a window, eyes darting back and forth.

My new mistress decided that I was meant to be a housecat when I came into her care, and I think it's one further point of evidence thrown on to my teetering stack of proof that she is the Snow Witch, reincarnated to witness my suffering in this cat body.

Were I born into it, I'm sure I could have adapted: could have assumed that the world was these four rooms, and that the things I could see from the window were like television programs or theatre, glimpsed through the magic pane of glass and arranged to entertain the people watching from indoors.

However, I was not born into this body, and it's the case that roved for long years in the body of a cat before I came to her and was housebound. When I sit at that window, I do not see a stage beyond, set up for my enjoyment. I see a further torment: a small sliver of the wide world that I know to be outside. I look out upon it, and I start to remember those years I spent outside, moving from one place to another, still adjusting to my newly cursed cat body. I watch the bugs crawl past on the concrete windowsill, and as a house centipede skitter past, it takes me back to the centipedes of Nippon.

Mukade they were called, which translates as "centipede," but they were as far beyond these piddly house centipedes as a full grown tiger would be beyond a housecat.

Here in north america, they have always kept cats to hunt rats-mice, spiders, and other small pests. In Nippon, however, the Mukade took care of all those smaller forms of pest, and it was the responsibility of the cats to keep down the mukade. You couldn't just squash one under your bootheel, as you would a house centipede. For one, you'd have a hard time finding a bootheel large enough. For another, their hard exoskeletons served like armour, and if you did succeed in breaching them, the remains of the mukade would emit a smell that would draw others to the corpse. If you squashed a mukade on your stairs and left it, you would find two more there the next day, investigating the remains.

The wisdom of wives told that the only sure, clean way to kill a mukade was to drop it into boiling oil-that, or to sick a cat on it.

There was a time when I was hired to hunt down a mukade that had been terrorizing a local Nipponese hotspring: Goto Onsen. You wouldn't imagine a centipede, as formidable as it may be, would be able to do much in the way of terrorizing beyond just surprising patrons. However, the way this thing had made a home of the onsen made it seem as though it was flaunting its filthiness and taking pride in the shadow that it cast over the baths and their proprietors.

Next to the temples of the Buddha and the shrines of the Shinto priests, the onsen was one of the holiest of places in old Nippon. On the surface, it was a bath: fed by mineral-rich water from the hotsprings that were the natural consequence of the volcanic nature of our island chain. For as long as anyone could remember, the Nipponese had been channeling these natural sources of hot water into outdoor stone pools, then into their very houses. These constant sources of hot water were revered, as if they were gifts from sulfurous gods dwelling down beneath the earth. They lookes like baths, but they were treated like baptismal fonts: divine waters from which the bather would emerge, as if reborn, after every visit.

Whereas here people enter baths dirty to emerge clean, in Nippon you must always be clean before entering the onsen. It must seem backwards to foreign eyes, but we go to great effort to scrub ourselves clean using buckets and soap and water before we dip the littlest of toes into the onsen. The cleansing that is offered by the onsen is not for your skin, but rather for your mind and your soul.

For this reason, there are people who were never allowed to enter the onsen: people from the underbelly of society like criminals-yakuza, you might know them as. It was believed that, just as the waters of these hotsprings were meant to cleanse your soul, so, too, could they be poluted by the introduction of souls that had been tainted by evil.

In an environment so obsessed with cleanliness, the presence of a mukade as large and filthy as the one that had taken up residence in Goto Onsen was a slap in the face for the proprietors. Beyond seeming generally unclean, it also set the local townspeople to whispering about how Goto might be fundamentally unclean: that the presence of the mukade might just be an omen of the fouling of the Goto spring from which the onsen sourced its water.

This was the state in which I came upon Goto Onsen, looking like a drowned cat from the lashing rains of a frigid, late November storm. I didn't even realized I'd happened upon an onsen, I just caught a golden square of light through a gap in some wooden boards, and I sprang through it into the onsen's genkan (entrance way).

I looked up at one of Goto's proprietors, who was standing there on the stoop, looking out into the storm. I meowed loudly, and he looked down at me, startled. Then a broad grin spread across his face, and he spoke three sylables in Nipponese.

"Perfect!"

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Author's Note: I started writing this yesterday for Wattpad Wednesday with the other folks at Wattpad HQ, but there was a lot more story in it than I could get through in one lunch. There is STILL more story to be got at, but in the interest of posting it somewhat near Wattpad Wednesday, I'll leave it as To Be Continued for right now.

Japanfile's Note: Mukade are real, and they are bloody terrifying. When I found out about my placement on the JET programme, and I learned that I would be in far northern Japan, north of The Wall, where it is winter for, pretty much, 5 months of the year, my co-JETs heading for warmer climes laughed.

Then we learned about Mukade, and how they were massive and impossible to kill using traditional means, and about how realities of climate meant that they never made it as far north as Hokkaido.

And then it was my turn to laugh.
And I did.
A lot.

House centipedes are bad enough. If I ever had to deal with a mukade, I would probably faint.

Also, all this business about Onsens is real. Well, real but maybe not absolutely historically factual. They are held in reverence, and they were historically closed to people deemed "impure." Some of that remains until today, and I always had to be paranoid about who I let see my tattoos in the Onsen.