Speak in the language of cats here. v1c0

Prologue

I love cats.

I love their shape, which looks like the very essence of happiness given form.

I love their adorable gestures; I can’t take my eyes off them whether they’re just moving about or doing something in particular.

I love their freedom—how one moment they can be completely lost in play, and the next, they’re gazing up at the sky as if deep in thought.

I’ve been around cats for a long time.

Ever since I was born, we’ve always had cats at home. Their numbers have gone up and down as we’ve taken in strays and found them new homes, but right now, we have twelve.

One of them has even been alive longer than my sixteen years. That would be seventeen-year-old Moo-san.

In human years, that makes her quite the old lady. The origin of her name, “Moo,” is simple: her white fur with black patches makes her look a bit like a cow.

“Moo-san, the vet was tiring, wasn’t it? Let’s have a snack when we get home.”

I lifted the cat carrier to eye level and spoke to Moo-san, who was looking out through the transparent plastic window. I could feel her solid weight in my arms.

Weighing in at six kilograms, Moo-san met my gaze and blinked her large eyes blankly. Their color was a pale, yellowish-green, just like a peeled grape.

Just like with humans, health problems come with old age. Moo-san’s check-up results hadn’t been good, so she’d been making regular trips to the vet for a while now. Today was another one of those trips; I had taken her to our regular animal hospital after school, and we were now on our way home.

“It’s already March, but the wind is still so cold, isn’t it?”

Cradling the carrier against my chest, I spoke to Moo-san’s gently swaying face as I walked. On the way back from the vet, I always took the path along the levee that ran above the riverbed, the same one I used for my school commute.

The sky directly above, where the sun had just set, was a deep indigo blue you could get lost in.

Just above the horizon, across the river, a reddish-golden light still lingered.

The townscape on the opposite bank had sunk into a jagged, dark silhouette, looking as small as a model diorama from this distance.

A cold, strong wind blew across the wide-open, unobstructed riverbed. It carried the scent of the night, something like burnt, withered grass.

There was no one else on the levee path but me. An hour earlier, it would have been bustling with students heading home and housewives returning from their shopping.

It was that strange time of day, a little too late to be called evening, yet a little too early for the curtain of night to fall. The sun was long gone, but the light of the afterglow remained, left behind in the sky and on the earth.

It was the magic hour that visits at twilight, when day and night switch places.

It was then, on the slope bathed in the last of the afterglow, that I saw a figure.

It was on the slope ahead of me, about twenty meters down from the levee where I stood. The first thing I noticed was a skirt, the same school uniform I was wearing.

Next, it was the color of her hair that caught my eye.

At first, I thought it was blonde, but looking closer, I saw it was just catching the color of the sunset. It was a shoulder-length, ash-silver that shimmered like the fur of a snow leopard.

(Beautiful…)

I was instantly captivated by the girl’s profile.

Her features were perfectly sculpted. Her eyes were a dark blue, deep as a winter lake. She was a foreigner.

It seemed she went to my school, but I’d never seen such a beautiful foreign student before. She wasn’t in my first-year class, at least, so maybe she was an upperclassman?

Standing on the bank as dusk settled, she stared intently down at something in front of her.

Her gaze was sharp, as if her enemy stood right there on the slope below.

I followed her line of sight to see what was there.

About five meters down the slope from the girl.

There was—

(Huh…?)

Sitting primly in the grass was a single stray cat.

It was a tabby with a white belly and brown and black stripes on its back.

It sat with its front paws together, its rear planted on the ground like a maneki-neko figurine, and stared quietly up at the girl on the slope.

The silver-haired girl was staring back at the cat with a serious expression… no, they were glaring at each other.

(What in the world is going on here?)

I naturally came to a stop, watching the girl and the stray cat face off in the twilight.

Part of it was that I was drawn in by the girl’s beauty and her life-or-death seriousness. But more than that, I was intrigued by the sheer strangeness of the situation.

I could feel a faint tension in her body as she leaned slightly forward. But it also felt like a preparatory motion, the coiling of a spring just before release.

It was the beautiful tension of an athlete waiting for the starting gun, one that would occasionally surface and then submerge again in the lines of her slender neck and the backs of her knees.

—And then.

In that instant, it felt as if all sound had vanished from the world.

My every nerve was focused on following the girl as she kicked off the dirt of the slope and leaped.

She had the ferocious aggression of a lion pouncing on its prey, and the refined beauty of a celestial maiden’s dance.

Expressing both within her small frame, she soared down the bank with unbelievable speed. And what’s more, she went headfirst.

Her target was the tabby cat.

The girl spread her arms wide and launched herself as if to embrace the stray. She moved with the desperate momentum of a headfirst slide in baseball or a body attack in pro wrestling.

As her blue eyes, filled with fighting spirit, closed in…

“Mrow.”

The stray just casually dodged.

Then it took off, running for its life down the bank. A cat can run at speeds of fifty to sixty kilometers per hour, faster than any medal-winning sprinter. And it can reach top speed in an instant from a complete standstill.

Having lost her target, the girl plunged headfirst into the grass. I couldn’t help but cover my eyes with one hand.

(Oof, that looked painful… I wonder if she’s okay?)

I was worried about the girl who’d just spectacularly wiped out, but she stood up right away, much to my relief.

She stared off in the direction the cat had fled with an angry (yet still beautiful) expression. Then she brushed the grass and dirt from her clothes, muttered something—probably in a foreign language—and calmly walked away.

Her small figure seemed to melt into the riverbed as it grew darker by the second.

—I wonder if I’ll see her again…—

I knew nothing about her. But that was my genuine thought, my wish.

I was thinking of the lingering image of that mysterious girl, who was as beautiful as if crafted by a god, yet whose actions were so surprisingly strange and comical… somehow reminding me of that creature I love so much.

***

The next day.

I passed through the school gates and headed to class as usual. Under the rows of cherry trees, their buds still tightly closed, students in the same Tobamori Private Girls’ High School uniform flowed toward the main entrance hall.

I changed into my indoor shoes at the shoe locker and walked down the first-floor hallway toward my classroom, 1-3.

“Morning!”

I greeted the classmates gathered around my desk, in the middle of the second row from the window.

“Morning, Koha-cchi. Your ears are bright red! Whoa, they’re cold.”

“Myaah, that tickles!”

Ume-chan, the tallest girl in our class, started playfully squishing my earlobes, which were cold from the morning air. Eri, who sat next to me, took off her headphones and turned to face me.

“Kohana, did you hear? We’re getting a transfer student today.”

“Ehh? I had no idea!”

I was surprised to hear such big news first thing in the morning.

“We have final exams soon, and after that it’s spring break before we move up a grade. I guess it must have been a sudden decision due to her parents’ circumstances?”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s such an odd time of year.”

Nodding in agreement with Eri, I decided to ask them about the thing that had been on my mind since yesterday.

“Oh, more importantly, have you heard anything? About a foreign student in the second or third year—”

Just as I said that.

The closed front door of the classroom opened, and our homeroom teacher, Higuchi-sensei, walked in. It was a little earlier than the usual start of homeroom.

And behind our teacher was…

“Ah.”

The very person who had become my greatest fascination had just walked in.

“Whoa, seriously?”

“Silver hair… Wait, is she a legit foreigner?”

It was the mysterious girl from yesterday, the one who had engaged in a bizarre confrontation with a cat on the riverbank at dusk.

Seeing her up close like this, she was surprisingly petite. Probably under 150 centimeters tall.

Dressed in her uniform just like yesterday, she stood in front of the blackboard at the teacher’s prompting.

“Everyone, listen up. I’d like to introduce a transfer student who will be joining our class from today.”

The classroom fell silent. Every single person was focused on the girl.

Sighs that sounded as if souls were escaping could be heard from all over.

Yes, everyone had already realized it.

“She’s ridiculously good-looking…”

“She’s short, but her face is tiny, too…”

That this girl was unbelievably beautiful.

“Alright, would you please introduce yourself?”

At the teacher’s words, the girl gave a slight nod.

She turned to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began to write her name.

The clack-clack-clack-clack of the chalk was a hard, rapid sound, like a machine gun.

The white letters that raced across the dark green board looked like English, yet seemed to be from a different language. An alphabet with a shape I’d never seen before.

“Hajimemashite. Ochen’ priyatno.” (Nice to Meet You)

The girl turned back to face us, her expression completely unchanged.

“I am Anna Grazkaya. I have come to Japan from Russia. I’ll be in your care starting today.”

She introduced herself in Japanese as fluent as a foreign film dub, but with the tone of a soldier from one of those films.

And that was how she and I met.