▸ Column · The Naruto ninja world — Hidden Leaf Village, feudal-modern Japan analog
OROCHIMARU replies.
Replied to by Orochimaru, with a rebuttal from Jiraiya.
The letter
My boyfriend Hiroshi moved in three weeks ago, and my cat Mochi has apparently decided this is a hostile occupation. Every morning, the second Hiroshi lays out his formal jacket for the mission office, Mochi appears from nowhere and settles dead center on it — kneading and shedding orange fur like that's her whole job. She has never once done this to my clothes. Not even the messy ones. She ignores the cushion I bought her and goes straight for the white jacket Hiroshi needs when he meets with the daimyo's court. Yesterday he left with an actual paw print smudged on his shoulder and just... pretended not to notice (which, honestly, I think only encouraged her). Is there any way to broker some kind of peace here? Or do I just accept that I'm dating someone my cat considers an enemy combatant and start buying lint rollers in bulk?
— Outnumbered in the Hidden Leaf
Orochimaru replies
Kukukuku. How delicious. You've sent me a cat.
Let me strip the sentiment away, because sentiment is obscuring the specimen you've actually got. Mochi has, in three weeks, demonstrated more strategic clarity than most shinobi I've observed in decades of fieldwork. She identified an interloper who disrupted established routines and stakes a daily territorial claim on Hiroshi's ceremonial whites — in full view of the apartment's original occupant. She has never done this to your garments. Not once. That precision is not jealousy. That is method.
You are really asking: should I trust the unsentimental judge or my sentiment? And I find the cat's position intellectually impeccable. She has shed every loyalty she wasn't already committed to, operates on pure assessment, and fears nothing. I recognize her. I have been her.
I would tell you to emulate her — and then comes the careful sentence, the only honest one I will give you. The man left for the daimyo's court with a paw print on his shoulder and chose warmth over dignity. That choosing is the one thing Mochi cannot do. It is, if I am to be scrupulously honest — and I am, strictly when it costs me something — a thing I can no longer do either. Study the judge. Stay with the man. The capacity to find someone worth that particular failure of cold reason is not, as it turns out, nothing.
— Orochimaru
Jiraiya weighs in
The Gallant Jiraiya, cutting in — and I'm going to tell you what my old friend just spent two hundred words carefully not saying. That cat is not strategizing. That cat is scared. Scared of losing the only person in that apartment she's certain still belongs to her.
He saw a cold genius at work. I see a frightened creature who found the most important thing in her person's life and sat on it, fur-first, because it was the only language she had.
Don't study the judge. The judge doesn't need an apprentice. Go home, sit on the floor with Mochi, and let Hiroshi sit next to you both and just exist there for a while. Trust takes time. So does the kind of faith that doesn't require guarantees first. You're not brokering a treaty — you're making an introduction. Start there.
— Jiraiya
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