Symbols If Cats Disappeared from the World Genki Kawamura

The Wristwatch: A Symbol of Broken Bonds and Lost Time

Introduction

In Genki Kawamura’s If Cats Disappeared from the World, a single broken object—a wristwatch—carries the weight of a family’s unraveling. It is not a magical device or a plot driver, but a quiet, physical reminder of time that cannot be reclaimed and love that was never spoken aloud. The watch belongs to the narrator’s late mother, yet it is inextricably linked to his estranged father, a clock repairman who poured his skill into fixing everything except the distance between himself and his son. Understanding this symbol means tracing its journey from a handmade gift to a lifeless shell, and finally to an unspoken invitation for reconciliation.

What the Wristwatch Literally Is

The wristwatch is the first present the narrator’s father ever gave to his mother. He built it himself, assembling “antique parts from his collection” into a timepiece she wore constantly. This detail matters: in a household where the father ran a small clock-repair shop on the ground floor, the watch was both an expression of his craft and an intimate, personal gesture. Despite being married to a man surrounded by clocks, she owned only this one watch. It hung on her thin wrist even as illness wasted her body, becoming so inseparable from her that the narrator later describes it as “a part of her body.”

The watch is broken. Sometime during the mother’s final hospitalization, it stops working. She asks her husband to repair it, and he leaves immediately to do so. He spends her last hours bent over his workbench, racing against a clock he cannot see. He fails: the watch remains dead when he returns a half hour after she has already passed.

Where the Wristwatch Appears in the Story

The wristwatch surfaces most starkly in the Friday chapter, when the narrator relives his mother’s death. The memory arrives unprompted as he frantically searches for his cat Cabbage, convinced he has erased felines from the world. The recollection is violent and precise: the hospital room, the setting sun glowing pink through a west-facing window, his mother’s voice apologizing for leaving him alone. During their last conversation, she tells him the watch’s history and gently defends his father: “There are different ways of showing someone you love them.” Hours later, she is dead, and the father stands in the room clutching the still-broken watch. The narrator “cursed him” in that moment and has not spoken to him in the four years since.

The watch reappears once more as a physical object left on the bedside. The narrator picks it up, holds it to his chest, and sobs alone in the empty room. He thinks of Lettuce, the childhood cat, and the red collar left behind when that cat died—another hollow shell of a presence that was. From that day, the watch is not mentioned again as a tangible item, but its symbolic weight lingers.

Indirectly, the watch’s world is touched earlier, on Thursday, when the devil Aloha announces he will erase all clocks. The narrator’s first thought is of his father hunched over the workbench in “that tiny shop tucked away in a corner of that little town.” A pang of guilt hits him: without clocks, his father’s skills and livelihood would vanish. Though the wristwatch is not named in that chapter, it belongs to the same universe of measured time that the devil is dismantling.

How the Symbol’s Meaning Shifts

On its surface, the wristwatch is a token of romantic love—a young man’s bespoke gift to his future wife. But as the story moves toward the mother’s death, the watch transforms into a litmus test for the narrator’s understanding of his father. To the son, the father’s obsession with repairing it at the worst possible hour is inexplicable and selfish: “What were you thinking? Are you crazy? Why spend all your time trying to fix that watch? At a time like this?” Here the watch becomes proof of paternal failure, a sign that the father cared more about objects than people.

The mother’s perspective shifts the meaning again. For her, the stopped watch is not an emergency to be cursed, but a final gesture she understands. She knows her husband’s limitations—that “he just has a hard time expressing himself”—and sees his desperate attempt to repair the watch as his language of love. Her gentle defense opens a door the narrator is too grief-stricken to walk through at the time.

Only later, as the narrator approaches his own death and combs through childhood memories, does the watch begin to mean something else: an unbroken thread. It is the last thing his mother asked of his father, and the father tried, however imperfectly, to honor the request. The watch stands in for the family connection that the narrator thought was shattered. Accepting that the watch cannot be fixed becomes parallel to accepting that relationships do not need to be perfect to be real.

Character Connections

The Father embodies the paradox of the watch. He can repair hundreds of timepieces in his cramped shop, yet he cannot fix the one that matters most. His absence at the moment of death is not indifference; it is a tragic misdirection of effort. The narrator eventually recognizes his own face in his father’s, a physical reminder that time and blood refuse to sever cleanly.

The Mother is the watch’s keeper and interpreter. She wears it close, asks for the repair not as a demand but as a test of trust, and uses it to teach her son something vital about forgiveness. Her posthumous letter, discovered in the theater with the ex-girlfriend, ends with the plea “Please make up with your father,” turning the watch’s silent presence into a charge.

The Narrator clings to the watch after his mother’s death, holding it like a relic. For years, he treats it as evidence of his father’s inadequacy. But the narrator’s own journey—losing phones, movies, and nearly cats—teaches him that loss is not always final. By the final chapter, he does not retrieve the watch; he retrieves his willingness to see his father again, pedaling toward the man who still lives in the next town.

Thematic Links

The wristwatch sits at the intersection of several core themes explored further in the novel:

  • Trade-offs and the Cost of Existence: The devil’s bargain erases objects to buy extra days, but the watch illustrates that some prices—missed goodbyes, years of silence—are already paid before the deal begins.

  • Memory and Identity: The watch is a memory trigger, pulling the narrator back to the hospital room and forcing him to relive a formative rupture. His identity as a postman, which he connects to his father’s influence late in the book, is tangled in the same web of unspoken affection.

  • Mortality and Acceptance: A broken watch cannot be restarted, just as a dying mother cannot be saved. Accepting the watch’s silence is a small rehearsal for accepting death itself.

  • Love and Sacrifice: The father sacrifices his final moments with his wife to try to fix a material symbol of his love—a sacrifice the narrator spends years misreading.

  • Family Estrangement and Reconciliation: The watch is the hinge on which the estrangement swings. Returning to the father is not about receiving a working timepiece; it is about delivering the narrator’s own letter, his own attempt at repair.

Study Questions

1. Why does the father’s failure to repair the wristwatch enrage the narrator so completely?

The narrator interprets his father’s absence as a moral failure. He believes being physically present at his mother’s bedside was the only correct way to express love, and the father’s choice to work on the watch feels like a betrayal. The anger also masks fear: if his father cannot fix a small mechanical object, what hope is there for fixing their relationship? The watch crystallizes four years of accumulated distance into a single, unforgivable moment.

2. How does the wristwatch reinforce the novel’s ideas about the arbitrariness of time?

The watch is a human-made device that imposes order on flux. When it stops, it mirrors the mother’s body winding down and the narrator’s terminal diagnosis—both beyond the reach of clocks. The novel argues that time is a set of “arbitrarily determined rules,” and the broken watch exposes the gap between chronological measurement and lived experience. Hours in the hospital felt both endless and vanishingly short.

3. What does the mother mean when she says there are different ways of showing love, and how does the watch prove her point?

She means that love does not require the same language from every person. The father’s way is to labor over a mechanical object, to pour skill and attention into a gift rather than sit in a chair and say words. The narrator does not accept this until much later, when he realizes that he, too, has chosen a profession—postman—that delivers objects rather than emotional speeches. The watch is the quiet evidence of a love that was never translated into conversation.

4. How does the wristwatch prepare the narrator for the final reconciliation with his father?

Picking up the lifeless watch four years earlier was an act of grief still tethered to the father, even in anger. By the novel’s end, the narrator no longer needs the watch to feel connected. He sees his own reflection as his father’s spitting image, writes a long letter, and physically carries himself to the father’s doorstep. The broken watch taught him that some things cannot be fixed backward in time—they can only be carried forward.

Conclusion

A wristwatch made of antique parts, worn thin over years of use, and stopped at the moment of deepest loss is one of the quietest yet most devastating symbols in Kawamura’s novel. It never ticks again on the page, but its stillness speaks. The narrator’s journey from the mother’s hospital room to his father’s doorstep is a journey toward understanding that broken things do not have to be discarded. The watch remains broken. The relationship remains imperfect. The final act—delivering a letter, not a repaired heirloom—shows that what matters is showing up with whatever you have left in your hands.