By Amber Lee
Nearing my fifth decade, I’m still uncertain if I’m driven by fear or hope, avoiding or seeking. I only know if you keep looking forward, you don’t have to see the landscape, the cities, the relationships crumbling behind you.
This summer, when I dragged my two teenage boys and boyfriend across the Pacific Ocean, then on three Japanese bullet trains from Tokyo to a Southern Prefecture of Japan, followed by a mind-numbingly boring five-hour car ride to a town called Nagahama, I knew I was seeking. Off the coast of Nagahama, accessible only by a small ferry that runs twice a day, is an island called Aoshima, known to many as Cat Island.
I saw it in a video once. It was the manifestation of a place I used to run away to in my mind when blood was drawn, shots were given, voices were raised, or hope was lost. A place where humans are scarce, but cats are abundant–soft, warm anchors that compel you to sit still and scratch under their chins even while the world around you burns. I longed to be swallowed up in a sea of padded paws and question-marked-shaped tails. To lie on the ground and be buried under their purrs so that one moment of my time on this earth could feel like an arrival instead of a stop along the way. All of that soft furry weight allowing me to be still and stop planning the next leg of the lifelong journey toward somewhere else.
Aoshima was a vibrant fishing village in Ehime Prefecture that introduced cats during the 1940s to keep the “mouse population in check.” The rest of the story is eerily similar to Grimm’s Pied Piper. Generation after generation, the children left to follow the promise of the song sung by nearby cities. The elderly died. The ferry slowed to only two trips a day. Now there are only six elderly residents that live in a town that’s being slowly pulled back into nature by weeds, vines, and cats. So many cats.
The night before the ferry ride, we stayed in a traditional Japanese home near the port. Curled on a tatami mat in the hot upstairs room, I barely slept. We had two chances to get to cat island if the weather was good. The first ferry ran at 8:00 am and the second at 2:30 pm. Guidebooks warned that waiting on the 2:30 pm ferry was risky because sometimes the ferry was full of goods being transported for the few remaining residents. I couldn’t take the risk. I’d filled a backpack with snacks for lunch, sunscreen, hats, a pound of dried anchovies, and 100 squeezie tubes of cat food, and we planned for an eight-hour day on the island. An island without restaurants, shops, or the ever-abundant Japanese vending machines. An island with just a few places to sit around uninhabited and boarded-up buildings. But the eight hours seemed appropriate because does a pilgrimage even have meaning without some suffering?
Driven by my anxiety, we made it to the boat early. There was only one other couple—
a younger Korean couple that kept to themselves even after repeated, overly friendly Midwestern head nods, waves, and smiles from my boyfriend—and a single man on the ferry. I sat on the back deck of the boat and felt the ocean air and the rumble of the engine…all things that I know fill many people with life, and I tried to breathe that life down into my lungs and into my DNA. This is who I am now. I’m a woman who rides on small ferries, and my hair is coated with ocean salt. But my unseaworthy stomach only allowed that illusion to be sustained for so long, and eventually, I went to one of the passenger seats inside the ferry to lean my face against the cool glass of the window and half sleep. An hour later, when the engine slowed, and the footsteps on the upper deck became more purposeful, I walked to the deck, looked out over a small dock, and couldn’t help but smile. Five cats sat on the deck, watching the boat to moor. After so much wandering, this was an arrival.
Arrivals used to be one of the best parts of being in the airport. Before people decided that planes should have the dual purpose of transportation and murder, you could sit near your gate and watch as family members, lovers, and friends waited with signs and flowers and strained smiles as the person or people they’ve missed arrive in a metal tube from the sky and were deposited back in their lives. I always felt the residual impact of their happiness and joy. Now, airport greetings are just shorthand text messaging confirming what door you’ll exit when you get your suitcase and an awkward, seat-belt encumbered hug in the car.
But here on cat island, the cats endure the slow process of the boat puttering into port. They stay while ropes are tied, and the engine is killed. They stay while passengers disembark and try again to find the balance appropriate for walking on surfaces that don’t sway.
I was the first off the boat and, without hesitation, headed for the first white and ginger cat on the dock. His eyes were rimmed with black mucus, the tip of his left ear was missing, and his white fur had a decidedly gray cast, but he was the ambassador of my imagined solace. He allowed one pat and then bit me.
There are boundaries on cat island–boundaries placed by the few people who live there and boundaries placed by the cats.
Other than a tiny strip of sidewalk, a pier, a shrine that has seen better days, and a garbage-filled beach, all other walkways to access other parts of the tiny island are roped off. The six elderly residents who live there have clearly tired of being an attraction and just want to live out their final days without being part of someone else’s Facebook, Instagram, or Tik Tok story.
The only place dedicated to tourists is a tiny room with a few dilapidated industrial chairs and a filing cabinet at the end of the dock. This is a place where visitors can get some sanctuary from the cats – eat a sandwich – without the threat of teeth, claws, and fur. The filing cabinet is a place to leave leftover cat food that the locals can feed the cats after the visitors leave. Then there’s a tiny room with a toilet and a sink. Unlike every other toilet in Japan, which normally washes, dries, and bubbles, this is just a regular flushing toilet like you’d find in any American home. The toilet is flanked by two windows without coverings that look out onto an alley-like street covered in vines.
The island’s only attraction, the cats, are a hybrid between house pets and feral. They will entertain your attention to obtain food, but as the hoard of tiny mammals approach you, you quickly see this will be no Disney experience. The cats are dirty. Their eyes are nearly crusted shut. Many of them are missing parts (tails, legs, eyes), some of them are matted, some of them appear to have mange, some of them are so congested that they wheeze when they breathe, some of them look like they may lie down and never get back up. To be anchored to the earth by this group of felines is to be anchored firmly in reality—no one is getting out of this life without some pirate-like scars.
My children, lifelong owners of pampered, spoiled indoor cats, some of which cost more than a used car, are appalled.
“Let’s just feed them,” I say. This is the first wave of cats. I convince everyone to sit on the bench and pass out handfuls of cat food tubes. The animals descend. They’re on laps, under our feet, on our backs when we bend over to feed a cat on the ground. They are slurping, and hissing, and fighting with each other. They are swiping and stealing and purring. They are jockeying to be the closest to the givers of food and then vaulting off into obscurity when food has been procured.
A long-haired brown tabby crawls out from what we can only assume is the underworld, and the cats make a wide berth to allow him through. He’s unambiguously won the alpha role, and it’s cost him an eye and part of his tail. His fur is crusted with mud, but he stands straight and makes direct eye contact with all humans with food. We hand over the offering, keeping our hands and soft flesh as far from his teeth as possible. There will be no purrs or patting.
“This is fucking awful,” my sixteen-year-old says, and I don’t even pretend to be offended by his language. “These cats are dying.”
“I think they just have a cold,” I say, but I’m not sure.
A calico saunters around the corner. She’s shaved bald, all except the tip of her tail and her head, which is ringed by a new pink collar. She makes her way to me and jumps softly into my lap. She curls into a tiny donut shape and purrs. She doesn’t even ask for food. I’m now a resident of this island, this bench. Someone clearly loves and cares for this one cat among the hundreds of cats that are limping, running, and hunchback crab walking around me. She’s had enough love that she wants to share it with me, and my heart melts. How is it so much easier to love those who are already loved, already cared for?
I have been the cat that crawled from hell. I’ve been the cat lying in a pool of phlegm. I’ve been the one-eyed, one-legged pirate cat, but I’ve so rarely been this shining calico. But still, I delight in the weight of her. I want her to love me and only me. I know in my heart that she deserves better than this place. I imagine how I could get her home where she can have a cat tree shaped like a carrot, a cat playhouse shaped like a sushi restaurant. Surely a cat this loving doesn’t deserve to be on this island of misfit toys. Surely she belongs with me, where she’ll be loved, spoiled, and cared for.
“Mom, let’s go see the rest of this shit hole,” my sixteen-year-old grumbles. I reluctantly deposit the cat, which I’ve decided is my cat and is now named Marble Cake, onto the bench, and I follow my sons along the sidewalk framed by empty houses and a few small fishing boats. Along the way, there are cats. Cats lounge on the fishing boats. Cats sit on stoops. Cats appear from alleys. About half a block down from the dock is what looks like it may have been a town center. It’s full of the worst of the cats—the ones that are so full of phlegm and so not full of life that they don’t even bother to move when dried anchovies rain down on them like pungent confetti.
We walk below a concrete Torah gate and up moss-stained stairs to a small shrine. “I wish we wouldn’t have fucking come here,” my sixteen-year-old says, a vulgar prayer offered up to the old tired gods of the shrine.
What can I say? We are here for the next seven hours, and no wishing or prayers will change it. I don’t know if this trip was a mistake. These cats are both free and suffering. If they had a choice, would they choose the safety and comfort of my house, knowing they could never go outside again? Would the cats that are in my house now give up their comfort and safety for the freedom of this island?
I try to imagine Meepers, my purebred Ragamuffin, here with her silver-dollar-sized blue eyes, soft chocolate paws, and fur that mats if it’s not brushed daily. Would she survive? Would she thrive? Would that vacant stare she’s had since birth be replaced with some kind of purpose? I imagine Meeper’s delicate cream fur tinged gray and full of twigs and spiderwebs. She would love chasing the bugs and going down to the boats to beg for fish scraps, but I’m not sure how long she’d hold up in this colony of cats that have survived here for generations. Freedom would look really rough on Meepers.
When I was a little girl, I would lie next to my grandmother on the couch and put my feet on her lap. She would run her long rose-colored fingernails over the bottom of my feet. “Take a deep breath and be still,” she would say. “Let your mind go to something else. Someday you may need to go through something, and this will help.” My grandmother, a woman who survived extreme poverty, and alcoholic father who loved to chase his children with a belt, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, and all the deaths we are fated to carry when we live to old age, gave me a tool I’ve used to survive my own alcoholic stepfather, my own cancers, and eventually her death, which happened forty-five minutes before I landed in the Cleveland airport to get to her side.
“You can do anything for seven hours,” I tell my son, who is angry at me and the island and the pain he’s already carrying from his short time alive. This is my fill-in-the-blank mantra for life—you can do anything for x amount of time. What I don’t say is: even when those seven hours are over, you’ll carry them around for the rest of your life.
We find a tiny path behind the shrine that leads through the trees and opens into a small clearing with what was once probably a school. There are signs on the building in English and Japanese: “Dangerous. Stay Out.” The building was obviously abandoned decades ago. Three knee-high-sized stones with etchings sit in front of the main entrance.
“Do you think these are graves?” my youngest asks.
“They might as well be,” I answer. I have given up on the Pollyanna façade. This island is depressing. There seems to be no way to turn this around, and acknowledging the reality may direct their anger toward the situation instead of me.
“We were promised fluffy tails, and purrs, and little pink beans,” I yell at the school.
“And we were promised that we would go on forever,” the memories of the long-dead teachers, and parents and students yell back.
We walk back down the short trail, past the shrine, past the town center full of wheezing cats, and toward the ocean.
The single man from the boat is sitting on a bench in front of what may have once been a store. He’s reading a book, and a slightly bedraggled-looking brown tabby sits beside him.
“I think that dude’s smoking pot,” my youngest says after we pass him, but before we’re far enough away for the guy not to hear. It’s unlikely that this Japanese man is smoking pot, but that’s really not what concerns me about this statement.
“How do you know what pot smells like?” I ask.
“Kids smoke pot in the bathroom at school.”
I try to sigh my soul out of my body. We’ve only been on the island for an hour, and I want to lie down and sleep. I would like to not think about the sick cats, my constant and barely controlled anxiety about my children’s future, or how this vacation may have traumatized my more sensitive older son.
“Let’s go to the beach and eat lunch,” I offer. We climb down some crumbling steps. The beach is rocky and filled with garbage that’s washed ashore. But it’s also filled with thousands of broken pieces of polished ceramics and sea glass. What might have been a cup or a bottle or a plate is now a tiny treasure.
We slather our hands in sanitizer and sit on the rocks and eat Pringles, cookies, and sandwiches from Seven-Eleven. We then disperse into our own worlds. My oldest walks out to the pier and sits with his back against a rock, staring out into the sea, away from the island. My youngest paces the island with a can of Pringles. I see him knee-deep in the water at the beach. I see him climbing a rotting ladder to a lookout. I see him peering into the crevices of crumbling buildings. My boyfriend returns to the building near the port and tries, once again, to make friends with the Korean couple. I walk between the three of them.
I sit with my oldest and marvel at a sickly cat that’s taken up sentry near his feet. I leave him with a stash of sardines and cat food. I ask him over and over again if he’s okay.
Against my best judgment, I climb the broken ladder onto a stone lookout to sit with my youngest. I disappoint him by not knowing the names of bugs and plants.
I sit next to my boyfriend on the dock bench. He is surrounded by cats and smiling. He’s successfully had a short conversation with the Korean couple with the Google translate feature of his iPhone, and he’s excited that they’ve just gotten married. He doesn’t understand why I don’t want to go talk to them.
I make this circuit of pain, curiosity, and friendliness for hours. Sometimes I go into the small waiting room to take a break, not from the cats, but rather a break from being disappointing.
Halfway through the circuit, my youngest son joins us on the bench. In one hand, he has a half-eaten tube of Pringles. In the other, he’s carrying a rust-colored crab. It’s the first thing, other than cats, spiders, and bugs, that I’ve seen alive on this island.
“That’s neat,” I say. He holds it between his thumb and forefinger, and it waves its tiny crab claws at me.
“You should put it back in the ocean so it can live,” my boyfriend says.
My son has Airpods in his ears, and I never know if he’s listening to music, or a book on tape, or if they’re just in his ears as an excuse not to respond. He grabs some of the tubes of cat food from our stash and continues pacing.
Half an hour later, he comes back with just an empty tube of Pringles.
I mime removing the Airpod, and he reluctantly plucks it from his ear.
“Did you put the crab back in the ocean?” I ask.
“I covered it in cat food, and the cats ate it,” he says.
I stare at him. In my lap, I hold tubes full of animals we are feeding to the cats. Since I can’t read Japanese, I’m not even sure what animals they are. I have a bag full of dried anchovies that are staring at me accusingly, and yet, I feel ill thinking of the one living thing on this island being devoured by the sickly cats.
“That was an interesting choice,” I say.
“They really liked it,” he said, and I truly have no idea if he was being kind or unkind. I’m losing my way. My son has chosen the side of the predators.
“You’re getting burnt,” he says and pulls aside the square-necked collar of my blouse, a thin silk top covered in peace doves. There’s a line of demarcation. White against pink.
The scar on my arm from melanoma surgery screams at me. My dermatologist, a mild-mannered man who has never been anything but quietly kind screams at me. My future self, disfigured and undergoing chemo, screams at me. “Get it to-fucking-gether,” they all say.
I pull the sunscreen from the backpack and go to the tourist waiting room. I sit on an uncomfortable chair. I press the palms of my hands into my eyes. It’s 2:30 pm. The boat will be here at 4:00. You can do anything for an hour and thirty minutes, so I spray myself down with sunscreen and go back to the island.
I find my boyfriend on the stone steps leading down to the fishing boats. He has a white and orange wheezing cat on his lap that looks suspiciously similar to the cat that bit me.
“I talked to a woman who is visiting here from Kyoto,” he said. He points at the Google Translate feature on his phone. “She came here to go fishing and visit a friend.”
We sit for a while, and all of the passengers but the lone man wander to the steps. My sons, the Korean couple, my boyfriend and I pace in this small area near the dock. The elderly woman comes back and says “Cohee,” and mimes drinking a cup of coffee. We all follow her—past the place with the sickest cats, past the shrine that’s no longer answering prayers, through a roped-off area that opens into a path filled with hydrangeas, azaleas, and lavender, to a home.
Along the way, my boyfriend is using Google Translate and conveying the plan to the rest of us. She has an older friend who speaks English. She learned by listening to radio programs in English for an hour a day. She wants to invite us to coffee. The four of us don’t drink coffee, but that doesn’t matter. We would never tell them that.
Her friend is waiting at the end of the path, smiling and waving.
“Sit, sit,” she says, pointing to an outdoor table. She hurries into the house, and I try to make small talk with the Korean couple, who, we find out now, do speak English.
“There’s a large Korean population in Alaska,” I say. “Both of my sons got black belts in Tae Kwan Do.”
They nod at me. I sound like an asshole.
The elderly women come back with a tray of cups filled with coffee, sugar, and creamer. We all take a cup. I watch my children dump packet after packet into the black liquid and then slowly raise it to their lips. I think of my ulcer and take a small sip.
“I was born in this house,” the woman says. “I’m eighty-four. My parents died, and now I come here in the summer. I built this small apartment.” She motions to a newer building. “The old house is falling apart.”
My oldest son tips up his coffee cup and finishes the last of it, and then reaches in front of me to take mine. It is an incredible act of thoughtfulness and politeness, and my eyes water as I watch him put more sugar into this second cup.
The friend who led us here takes off her fishing jacket, and below it, she has a shirt that says Aoshima, but the mountains of the island are shaped like cats. My boyfriend’s eyes light up.
He types some words into his Google Translate and holds his phone up for the woman to read. The woman smiles and points at her friend. She says a few words in Japanese.
“I made those,” the woman says.
“Do you have more?” my boyfriend asks, and they disappear into the old house. I look at the clock on my phone. The ferry will be coming soon. Now that we’ve settled into this island, found friends, a place, and some comfort, it’s almost time to go.
“Amber, come look at these,” my boyfriend yells from the door. We all stand. We all go into the old house. The floor is soft and bends beneath our feet. The two women are digging through bags on the raised floor of a room with a small shrine.
“Pick some shirts,” he says. They are every color. I love the green one, but it’s for someone the size of a Japanese woman. “Too small for you,” the older woman says. So I choose a black and a gray, and my boyfriend hands them cash.
“You should sell these at the dock,” my boyfriend says. “You should make more and sell these.”
“I don’t have money,” the woman says, and we all smile. We are all uncomfortable.
I put my shirts in the backpack, and we help to clean up the coffee cups.
I try my best to say ‘thank you’ and ‘your home is lovely’ in Japanese, and they smile. We take pictures together. We walk back to the dock.
Half a dozen people are fresh from the second boat. They are wandering and smiling and taking photos as the rest of us sit dazed on the bench, waiting for the ferry to allow us to board.
I’m pacing the areas that aren’t roped off, looking for Marble Cake. She is missing. I circle the island but can’t find her. I peek past the ropes to the streets where I’m not welcome. I feel like sobbing. I feel ridiculous. I want her to come to me to say goodbye. I want her to acknowledge me. I want her to look at me longingly and ask to be hidden in my backpack.
I pull a fishing pole-like cat toy from my backpack. At the end is a spray of bright-colored feathers. I sit on the bench and flick it into the air. Cats stalk, and leap, and twist in the air, and pull at the feather.
A young Japanese girl with a wheat-colored bob sits quietly and watches.
“Would you like some cat food,” my boyfriend asks her and pushes leftover tubes into her hands. A nearby Japanese man helps her cut them open.
“You can tell if the cats are boys or girls by the side of the tip of the ear that’s missing,” he says to all of us. “On females, it’s the right ear, and on males, it’s the left. They notch them once they’re fixed.”
“What about all the missing tails,” my youngest son jokes.
“Cats with their tails bobbed have better personalities,” he says, and we all stop laughing and stare at the missing and mangled tails.
With the open packets of food, the young Japanese girl is now surrounded by cats, and she’s giggling wildly. She looks at us and yells: “So happy!”
My sons are down by the dock laughing too. They’ve found a pod of jellyfish, and they’re watching their ethereal tentacles. I try to ignore the conversation: Do they have time to get a stick to poke one? Are these the ones that sting? Do they eat spit like fish? Would the cats eat them?
I’m ready to be on the boat. I make one more lap of the island to find Marble Cake, but she’s gone. I will never see her again.
I board the ship and go directly to the indoor seating. I close my eyes for a second, but then I feel guilty. These are my last moments on the island. I came so far to get here. I force myself to look at it. From this vantage point out in the water, I can see behind the tourist building. There’s a woman there surrounded by hundreds of cats. She’s flinging fish scraps to them, and they’re circling her like a pod of orcas making a bubble net. They’re hemming her in. I watch her as the boat loads and the ropes are untied, and the engine gears up, and we pull away into the ocean. I can’t see her face clearly, but she moves like a woman who is repeating a daily chore. She’s moving the way a person moves when you’ve done something so many times that your body is at the helm and your mind is elsewhere.
My oldest son sits next to me. “I want to come back and fix this for them,” he says. “Fix their houses. Fix the sick cats.”
To me, this seems to be the last generation of Aoshima. The children of the elderly are not joining their parents here for vacation. They are going to Europe. They are going to America. They are going to Disney. They have no ties to this place. The cats have all been altered. There will be no more kittens, and in ten years or less, the last of the cats will die and will not be replaced. The vines will pull down every last house, even the new apartment our host built. The birds will come back someday, and maybe a mouse will hitch a ride on a boat to take up residence. Aoshima is at its end. Am I happy I saw it? I lean my face against the window. I am tired from sunburn and anticipating seasickness.
When we get back to the mainland, the four of us pause and stretch on the dock.
The young Japanese girl to whom we gave cat food, slips a note into my boyfriend’s hand, bows, and quickly walks away.
He opens it and reads it out loud.
“I came to cat island from the north of Japan because I was struggling. These cats and your kindness have healed me.”
Since I’ve been home, a few people have asked about Cat Island. They would love to go there and see the cats, they tell me. “Should I go?” they ask. “Was it worth it?”
I want to tell them that if you can wait out the suffering, there will be moments of joy. I want to tell them that I have no idea what their experience of the island will be and that I can give them advice, but everyone’s journey will be different. Instead, I just shrug: “There are so many cats,” I say, and they smile.
Amber Lee is a boy mom, Alaska transplant, political consultant, former telecom marketing exec, cat foster, four-time cancer survivor, business owner, and writer. Former publications include “A Search for Meaning in a Dirty Apartment, a short fiction Explorations Literary Journal Contest Winner, and “And the Children Shall Inherit the Earth,” which was published in Subterrain Literary Magazine. I have a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage and worked as a volunteer editor for the Alaska Quarterly Review. You can find her on Instagram @alsmanagerie.
