What This Theme Explores
Loss, Memory, and Value in If Cats Disappeared from the World asks how we come to understand what matters: do things have worth on their own, or only through the memories and relationships they hold in place? The novel insists that value is not a property of objects but a human construction braided from feeling, time, and connection. As The Narrator barters days of life for erasing parts of the world, he discovers that even “useless” items are keystones in the architecture of memory. To lose them is to remove a load-bearing beam from his own identity.
How It Develops
The theme unfolds through the escalating stakes of the bargain with The Devil (Aloha). At first, the Narrator is almost relieved; the world feels cluttered, and sacrifice seems simple if he can target trivialities. On “Monday,” loss is a neat equation—one thing gone, one more day earned—an arrangement that treats value as purely transactional.
When “Tuesday” erases phones, the abstract becomes personal. Without contacts and call logs, the Narrator confronts how thoroughly he outsourced memory to a device, and the only number he can summon is his Ex-Girlfriend’s. The phone’s disappearance exposes its real function: not utility, but a lattice of relationships he’d mistaken for data.
“Wednesday” takes movies, severing not just entertainment but the cultural and intimate memories grafted to films—late-night debates with friends like Tsutaya, youthful awe, and family-bonded viewings. He recognizes that art’s value is communal: films become repositories where private lives and shared culture meet, and their absence creates a sudden silence where countless personal echoes used to resound.
On “Thursday,” clocks vanish, and the loss strikes at a family nerve. Clocks carry his Father—a clockmaker—back into view, dragging with them the felt weight of time, regret, and all the ordinary hours they never shared. Here, even an abstraction becomes intimate: time isn’t just measured; it is lived, and its instruments become vessels for unspoken love.
By “Friday,” the proposed erasure—cats—threatens the living thread binding him to Cabbage and his deceased Mother. The choice reframes value as absolute where love is concerned: some things are so entangled with memory and meaning that to remove them would collapse the self. The Narrator refuses to erase cats and chooses his own death, affirming that a life’s worth is defined by what it protects, not how long it lasts.
Key Examples
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The Last Phone Call: Stripped of his phone’s memory, the Narrator realizes he knows only his ex-girlfriend’s number by heart. This moment reveals that real memory lives in the self, not the device, and that the phone’s true value was in suturing fragile human connections. Loss exposes dependence—and, paradoxically, the resilience of genuine ties.
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The Empty Movie Screen: Asked to choose a final film, he projects a blank frame and sees his life as a long exposure—everything superimposed, inseparable. Movies taught him to assemble meaning from scenes; their erasure forces him to read his own life as a whole, where comedy and tragedy cohere into a single image whose value lies in totality.
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The Mother’s Philosophy: His mother’s credo—gaining requires losing—becomes the story’s moral fulcrum. Her posthumous letter values not achievements but shared moments and innate kindness, recentering worth around character and memory rather than outcome or accumulation.
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Choosing to Save Cats: The refusal to erase cats is the thematic summit. Cabbage is not “a pet” but a living archive of love—a bridge to his mother and a daily practice of care. By accepting death, the Narrator affirms that some values are non-negotiable because they safeguard the memories that make a life legible.
Character Connections
The Narrator’s arc is a slow reclamation of meaning. He begins detached, half-convinced that both his life and the world are clutter to be tidied away. Each disappearance pries open a sealed room of memory, teaching him that his identity has been stored in plain sight—inside ordinary objects and daily routines he overlooked.
The Mother anchors the story’s ethical compass. Even in absence, she instructs through her letter and remembered words, articulating a moral economy where value is measured by what we’re willing to give up for love. Her “10 amazing things” lists character and shared time, rebuking a metrics-obsessed culture with a ledger of tenderness.
The Father embodies the quiet cost of time poorly tended. The loss of clocks surfaces the intimacy of craft, the language of care he spoke through gears and springs, and the missed hours that still might add up to love. Their strained bond shows that value can be hidden in silence, discoverable only when its emblem—timekeeping—disappears.
The Ex-Girlfriend reveals how technology can simulate closeness while masking estrangement. Her place in his memory—one number he truly knows—suggests that real connection outlasts tools; what is held in the heart remains even as devices fail.
The Devil (Aloha) frames loss as commerce, which ironically pushes the Narrator beyond calculation. By reducing the sacred to “one thing for one day,” the Devil becomes the catalyst for recognizing that love and memory cannot be priced without destroying them.
Cabbage distills the theme into a living presence. The cat’s ordinary companionship becomes extraordinary under threat, revealing how daily rituals—feeding, touch, shared space—are repositories of irreplaceable meaning. Saving Cabbage is saving a life already interwoven with the Mother and the self.
Symbolic Elements
Erased Objects: Each disappearance is a laboratory of value. Phones expose dependence on external memory; movies reveal how community and identity are co-authored by shared stories; clocks convert time into relationship; cats anchor love as a living, untradeable good.
The Mother’s Letter: As a material trace of the dead, the letter is memory you can hold. It rejects inheritance as property and reframes legacy as the imprint our love leaves in others—proof that value is transmitted through remembrance, not possession.
The Stamp Collection: Forgotten stamps in a dusty box open the locked drawer of paternal love and the Narrator’s own path as a postman. Their smallness is the point: overlooked objects can carry an oversized freight of history, mapping how value accumulates quietly over time.
The Blank Screen: The projected white rectangle—the sum of every frame—turns absence into a metaphor for wholeness. It suggests that a life’s scenes cannot be evaluated piece by piece; meaning emerges only when we see them all together.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel reads like a parable for an age of endless acquisition and outsourced memory. We stockpile devices, data, and experiences while drifting further from the inner work of remembering and the slow labor of love. By dramatizing subtraction, the story asks what we would mourn if it vanished—and why we wait for loss to tell us. It invites a reorientation from counting things to keeping faith with people, from saving time to spending it well.
Essential Quote
“In order to gain something, you have to lose something,” she always said. People are always trying to get something for nothing. But that’s just theft. If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something.
This credo reframes life as an ethical exchange rather than a game of accumulation. It illuminates the Narrator’s journey: each erasure teaches that value is created through sacrifice and care, not extracted without cost. The choice to save cats becomes the ultimate proof that what truly matters is what we are willing to relinquish to protect love and memory.