Natsume Sōseki(1867-1916) suffered from cyclic mental depressions through his life, and it was when he was in the state of the most terrible one that he started his career as a writer by writing I Am a Cat(1905-1906). There are some evidence by his wife and friends that Sōseki’s condition of disease dramatically improved during its serialization on a magazine, and the writer himself admited humorously in the preface of other work that it was his depression and mania that enabled him to produce I Am a Cat and other early works. This paper aims at describing the process how his act of narrating had therapeutic effects on his state of mind focusing on the construction of complicitous relationship between an implied author and readers in the work by the unique functions of the first-‘person’ narrator: A Cat. Among others, I will consider the influence of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy(1759-1767), which Sōseki introduced to Japan for the first time, by discussing the frequent use of metalepsis that the two works have in common.
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