Feline Absence
I recently watched Madadayo, Akira Kurosawa's final film. It focuses on a retired professor, and several episodes that occurred during his life. In one of these, his cat, Nora, runs away and disappears. This is the longest segment of the movie, and the one during which the main character seems the most emotionally engaged.
Missing cats also figure prominently in Haruki Murakami's novels The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.
It makes me wonder if a missing cat has symbolism in a Japanese frame of reference that it does not for an American.