How is the cat's process of justifying stealing the fish quite similar to the human characteristic of rationalizing?

In order
to provide some guidance for your question, let us begin with a look at how The Oxford
Dictionary defines the verb rationalize: To attempt to explain or justify
ones own or anothers behavior or attitude with logical, plausible, reasons, even if these are
not true or appropriate.

We come across an instance of rationalization in the
first chapter of . The cat who narrates the story tells the reader how he
was taken out of the warm basket he shared with his siblings and dear mother by a
shosei (a student who does minor chores in exchange for room and lodging)
and pitched with violence into a prickly clump of bamboo grass. As a nearly helpless kitten,
the narrator is stunned, confused, and very hungry.

Driven by intense hunger,
he manages to enter the kitchen of a house where he meets an unkind servant woman named O-San.
No sooner had she seen me than she grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and flung me out of
the house. Hunger and cold drives the kitten to return to the kitchen. O-San flings him out
again. The process repeats itself several times, until the master of the house tells the servant
woman that the kitten may stay.

Understandably, the cat bears a grudge
against O-San for her cruelty. He explains how he dealt with this feeling. The other day I
managed at long last to rid myself of my sense of grievance, for I squared accounts by stealing
her dinner of mackerel-pie. Rationalization can be a kind of skewed and self-administered
justice that, at least in the mind of the aggrieved person, sets things right.

Unfortunately, people are not always able to clear up differences or have conversations
about things that have gone wrong between them. When one person feels like he or she is owed
something, rationalization may come into play in order to settle the feeling of a grievance
within oneself. The emotion-influenced reasoning involved in rationalization can give a persons
conscience permission to do something he or she might otherwise consider to be unethical. This
is clearly a human trait that is cleverly portrayed in the anthropomorphized narrator of the
cat.