I'm writing a short story (or prologue) where a bakeneko (a long lived demon cat) is sent to the Lands of the Forgotten and Fantasy along with the village where she lives, after it was abandoned by the government and turned into a ghost town. I'm still not quite sure how to end it. Her owner was a girl who survived being blasted at the Nagasaki bomb, and lived through it. Facing discrimination, she went to a mountain village to start a new life. She had children, grandchildren... who then died during a house fire/ car accident/ building collapse, leaving her an old woman with nothing but a cat for company, even as she grew older and older, with no one to take care of her. Until eventually, the town became a ghost town, as the living people died off or emigrated elsewhere. Until it was condemned. Until all that was left is one stubborn old woman who survived a nuke, along with her two-tailed cat. Until it is forgotten by the world and falls through the cracks to the world of fantasy. This is where it gets tricky: 1. The woman dies, maybe of cancer, maybe of old age, and the demon cat is left there, alone, burying her owner in a grave. She sits there, wandering through the long-abandoned buildings, reminisencing of her past, until the town fades away to the other world. 2. The town is forgotten by the world, and the old woman with her cat is transported to the Other side. There, they go on adventures. The old woman is still surprisingly spritely for her age, backed up by the supernatural powers of the demon cat, and they try and make their way into this strange new world. 3. The old woman turns out to have one remaining granddaughter whom she raised. Though the cat and granddaughter never got along, they tried to make peace for the old woman's sake. After the old woman died, the girl decided to leave her home and try to make a new life in the city, away from the dying economy of the village, leaving the cat there because it refused to leave with her. The granddaughter can serve as a plot point later, a later link to the normal, 'real' world.
In order to know how your story should end, you have to decide what the major problem or conflict is, along with what the protagonist(s) wants and what's keeping them from getting it. You have an intriguing premise there, or, should I say, several variations on the one premise. Pick the one with the most potential for action and ask yourself, "What could go wrong? What can happen to disrupt the characters' lives, and what do they do to get back to some version of normal?" (Normal for them, that is.) I.e., Boy meets girl is a premise. Boy meets girl and they fall in love is a scenario. Boy meets girl and they fall in love but they can't be together because her mobster ex-boyfriend wants to kill the boy but the boy isn't giving up is a plot. Again, I like your idea, but you need to have the old woman and the cat interact with some other people or some new problem before you have a story or can decide how you want it to end.
Well, I guess the biggest amount of potential conflict causing would be a 2 and 3 combo. With the granddaughter leaving her grandma behind because the grandmother was too stubborn to leave.
And what happens then? If it's really the story of the grandmother and the cat, that is, and not the story of the granddaughter?
I feel option 3 may be the best - it kinda has this fantasy and realism vibe about it. Option 1 is too realistic almost. Option 2 sounds like something I'd expect in a Ghibli movie. Option 3 also has the right amount of Japanese tragedy I feel. It's like the cat (and so symbolically, the old woman) had a chance to go and live their lives, they had a chance to go back to the "normal world", but it was by choice they stayed where they were. It was by choice they lived alone, and died alone. And it kinda elevates the point that people make different choices with their own reasons. Or you could interpret it as a tragedy. I feel this one has the ambiguity to match the thoughtful theme you have running. What you have described sounds very, very Japanese, with a traditional, tragic or bittersweet ending. Or story that doesn't seem to form a climax in the sense we know it in the West - that it's really all just downhill (Princess Kaguya, anyone?) and the tragedy of the ending is that you wait and wait for change and change never comes, as happens in life, and someone pays the price. The bittersweet choice of it, this sense that the tragedy was "undeserved" but you persevere - it feels very Japanese to me. Disclaimer: I'm not Japanese, but I am quite familiar with Japanese culture to some extent (grew up on anime and manga, worked in a Japanese school for 4 years)
