If Cats Disappeared From The World: Summary & Key Insights

When the story begins, the young postman’s days move in an almost mechanical rhythm. Delivering mail, feeding his cat Cabbage, eating the same meals. Then comes the call from his doctor—the abrupt diagnosis that his body has quietly begun to surrender. It is a scene marked by understatement rather than drama; I wanted the shock to feel almost gentle, because true disbelief often hides behind routine gestures. When he returns home, the ordinary world seems suspended. Yet it is precisely in that vacuum that the Devil appears. He looks just like the postman, only dressed more flamboyantly, his moods shifting between humor and menace. His proposal sounds absurd: erase one thing from the world and gain a day of life. The young man’s instincts hover between laughter and fear, but what unsettles him is not the presence of the Devil—it's the mirror image of himself. The Devil embodies the side of us that values survival over meaning.

I wrote this early encounter as both psychological and existential. The Devil’s offer is less about supernatural trade than about choice itself—the cruel arithmetic of mortality. His temptation suggests that life can be bought by subtraction, as if we could define existence by deleting. Yet this proposition soon turns the narrator into a philosopher of the everyday. His first negotiation, the disappearance of telephones, becomes a test not of greed but of memory: what do we lose when communication vanishes? The scene sets up the rhythm of the entire book: each deletion brings reflection, and each reflection draws the narrator closer to understanding that living isn’t about accumulating days—it’s about waking up to their weight.

When the Devil proposes that phones be erased, the choice seems harmless. After all, phones are just devices, and survival demands pragmatism. But the narrator begins to realize that phones are more than gadgets—they’re vessels of intimacy. As he recalls his relationship with Aoi, his former lover, the impulse to delete telephones turns into a meditation on distance. Their love began through calls that filled the void between schedules and loneliness; yet it slowly disintegrated when those calls stopped carrying meaning. I wanted the disappearance of phones to mirror the silence that grows between people when they stop really listening.

Once telephones are gone, communication collapses into physical presence alone, and the narrator experiences the absurdities of a world too quiet. Postal routes bring letters instead, but urgency—the heartbeat of connection—is missing. He walks through that silence feeling both free and bereft. Without phones, people misunderstand, wait too long, lose chances to say goodbye. And he begins to wonder: isn’t every word we exchange part of the fragile web that holds the world together?

What phones represent here isn’t technological dependence, but human frailty—the need for bridges between minds. Their absence makes the narrator recognize that relationships aren’t sustained by words alone, but by the desire to reach out. The Devil’s bargain teaches the cruel irony that survival purchased by isolation is no survival at all.