This is Casper. He is a green-eyed, black and white floof pudding, and one of the stray cats that visits my balcony for food. Multiple times a day. Sometimes in the same hour. He’s also a new star of a hot new video game.
Read MoreI ask how to open a door
I was standing semi-naked before of a completely featureless door with no handle and smelling of cat urine.
Read MoreThe curse of timelines of our imagination (on pet death)
Maybe everyone feels guilt when a pet dies. It is an end game consisting of decisions that you alone must make on behalf of someone you love, with utterly insufficient data to be able to choose with even the slightest degree of confidence. Streaming away from these critical temporal points are other timelines that may have taken you to the same final goodbye, worse situations, or a fantastical miraculous land of no regrets.
Read MoreCopycat
Slowly, I reached out with my hand and tickled her gently around the ears. Cassie lifted her head so I could scratch under her chin.
That was new. And sudden.
I looked back at Norah, who was head-butting my other hand. And then back at Cassie. I lifted an eyebrow and eyed the two cats. “You’re both jealous.”
Read MoreHi. I am your cat
One sunny day at the end of February, I spotted a young female cat in heat.
How did I know she was in heat?
Because there was a queue of male cats that had been summoned by her siren’s pheromonal song waiting to jump her. I grabbed my trap and joined the line, with a similar objective but quite a different end game in mind.
Read MoreThe starfish cats
Admittedly, saving every single stray cat in the world would be a slightly tough challenge. But this is one of those situations where you can make a surprisingly big difference with a very simple act: you can TNR the neighbourhood stray cats.
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How to tame your murder floof
After ten years in the Japan Cat Network shelter, Cassie was perfectly house trained. She used a litter box, grazed without over indulging on dry cat biscuits, and dug her claws into scratching posts and never the furniture. There was just had one rule:
Don’t touch the cat
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Cassie Cat
One month after I lost my cat, Tallis, I realised I was feeling two separate emotions. The first was grief for Tallis herself, for which there was no quick fix. But the second emotion was one of loneliness. The rooms of my apartment seemed to yawn their emptiness, and my crockery did not ever once look pleased to see me. As I made a cup of tea in one such ungrateful mug, I wondered why I had bothered coming home.
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The very best of memories
In November last year, I said goodbye to my beautiful mog, Tallis. She was the very best of furry friends, and I am quite determined to prove that to you all right now.
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Masters of a most disturbing universe
I stared into the eyes of the solidified form of my childhood and realised the horrifying truth: instead of carefree imaginings, the era had been one of limitless soul-sucking darkness and despair. It had definitely been worth the journey across Tokyo to check this out.
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The sakura downfall
“How are you doing? Do you have enough of everything?”
“I was just thinking of messaging you. Japan seems to weirdly… OK… compared to the rest of the world?”
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Peddling around a black hole
I was sitting at the edge of a black hole. Below me (in the gravitational sense), material was being dragged off a small moon to swirl in a brilliant white arc around a central region of impenetrable darkness. Behind this terrifying visage, Saturn loomed with the indifference of 100 trillion cubic kilometres of gas.
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The school which is my nearest evacuation point.
We flee a typhoon
I was discovering neither my jacket nor shoes were even vaguely waterproof. The rain was lashing so hard that I had to hold the umbrella in two hands, with my wet fingers clasping the plastic canopy to stop it turning inside out. Beneath this plastic shield, the backpack I was wearing across my chest yowled a protest.
Which was frankly a bit rich, since I was wrestling the umbrella for her benefit. Also, this was my second walk in the typhoon that was predicted to be the most powerful storm on record to hit the Greater Tokyo area.
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Mount Fuji is behind me… somewhere in the mist.
Horse business
“What you need to know about Brandy,” —I was told— “is that his default mode is to stop. Your job is to keep him going!”
But here’s the thing. My default was to stop too. Brandy and I were kindred souls. Which would have been just fine if I wasn’t trying to learn how to ride. Movement is somewhat of a prerequisite.
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View of the sumo ring in the Ryogoku Kokugaikan, Tokyo.
Striking one another
“According to legend, the very origin of the Japanese race depended on the outcome of a sumo match.”
It was 5:25pm and I’d dashed from my seat to catch the bookstand in the Ryogoku Kokugaikan —Tokyo’s sumo stadium— to buy the ¥100 booklet on the history and rules of sumo. Since the tournament ended at 6pm, I’d arguably left this a little late.
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Snapshot from the Holofit Babylon route.
I row the streets of Babylon
Typing is hard. This is because moving my arms to the appropriate level for the keyboard is deeply challenging. And this is because I rowed the streets of Babylon, rings of Saturn and covered a decent chunk of Antarctica.
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My parents' car bursts into flames
You know when you go for a quick twenty minute drive in the countryside, park your car and forty-five minutes later it spontaneously combusts?
Read MoreBlue sushi from blue kappas
Remember when your mother told you not to take sweets from strangers, don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and never NEVER accept blue sushi handed to you from a mythological water demon?
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Scene from Cafe Aura in Karuizawa
The hunt for Terrace House
"I erased him from my world," the girl sat with her friends in a restaurant, discussing a failed date with one of her housemates. The outing in question was with a guy named Yuudai who had the tenacity of wet spaghetti and wanted a girlfriend who would do everything for him, down to putting on his socks. I knew these details because I had watched the entire proceedings unfold the week before.
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The Medieval Enchanted Village
I took a bite of chocolate cake as I gazed out at the enchanted Medieval village. Overlooking the beige stone turrets, the evening sun was sinking into the snow-capped summit of Mount Fuji. I chewed thoughtfully. There were many aspects of my current situation that were surprising.
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