Novelist Masako Bando

In the essay titled Killing Kittens in the newspaper's Aug. 18 evening edition, Bando, 48, wrote that she owns three cats and throws their kittens off the cliff near her house on Tahiti.

"I am fully aware what severe criticism I may face if I write this," she wrote at the outset of the essay. "I will probably be condemned as a savage by animal lovers around the world, and people may say I am violating the animal protection law. Knowing this, I confess I am killing kittens," she wrote in her essay.

The business daily said it had received more than 500 e-mail messages and about 90 phone calls as of Aug. 24, many of them protesting and criticizing Bando, a 1997 winner of the Naoki Prize.

She wrote, "I chose enrichment of 'life' of the cats that I have raised and opted to kill the kittens out of a sense of social responsibility. Of course, I must bear the pain and grief that come from killing."

Bando says she is not opposed to other people sterilizing the kittens that cat owners abandon, as an act of social responsibility.

The Japan Times Weekly: Sept. 2, 2006
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