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I never thought I’d see my book translated into Chinese.
The thought just never occurred to me. I never thought,when I was writing a book set in Tokyo about a cat wandering the streets in the lead up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics ... well, I never thought the Olympics themselves would be postponed to 2021.
Writing the book was a wonderful process for me. I’d returned from Tokyo to England in 2015 to attend the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, famous for producing many of Britain’s finest novelists like Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. I was so excited to attend this course, and after many years of living in Japan, getting some distance from the country I loved and returning to England to focus on my studies gave me the perfect environment to try to write about the elusive and wonderful city that is Tokyo. I knew right from the start that the city itself, and my fictional stray cat Naomi would be the two constants throughout the novel that would link its interconnected characters. I also knew from the start that I wanted to capture both the light and dark sides of Tokyo.The joy, and the pain.
So many things regarding the publication of my debut novel I thought would happen, didn’t happen. There was no book launch. I didn’t get to go see my book in bookshops as I’d always dreamed ... but, upon its release in lockdown of 2020,things I would never expect to happen started to happen. The book connected with readers, and not just in my own language,but many others as well. It got chosen by the BBC Radio as a book club pick; my favourite living author David Mitchell who wrote Cloud Atlas posted about it on social media; it began to be translated into many languages, and even though the world felt smaller, living cooped up in my house in Norwich with my then girlfriend（now wife）, and our little black and white cat Pansy.
Our cat Pansy was the basis for the cat, Naomi, in this novel you now hold in your hands. I met her just a month after I started writing this book back in the autumn of 2015. I’d already decided my cat was a calico before I’d met Pansy, so her appearance differs, but the personality of my fictional cat,the movements, the grace all came from her.
We can learn a lot from cats – they often seem to encapsulate the air of philosophers – Zen-like and thoughtful. I always saw Pansy as the embodiment of a poet. She would sit at the window, or in the garden, and admire nature, taking life as it came. She never hunted birds, or killed animals. She just watched, and pondered, ever so deeply, this strange existence we call life.
I have extremely fond memories of visiting China in the past – and I still remember clearly the kindness and warmth of the people, the wonderful architecture, and of course the delicious food I encountered when I travelled there on short holidays – an easy flight for me while I was living in Japan. Pansy passed away in 2021, but I like to think she lives on forever in the pages of this book. I’m so happy that Chinese readers now have a chance to meet her, and I hope you enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Nick Bradley
Norwich,2024