Two Japanese books about cats #ReadingTheMeow

Japan truly seems to love a book about a cat, and I am here for it. Two of the other books I’ve read for the #ReadingTheMeow themed week are short Japanese novels with ‘cat’ in the title – though arguably the cats are not the main characters in either of them. (Except in the way that any mention of a cat automatically makes it the main character.)

If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura

I was sent this as a review copy when it was translated into English in 2018, by Eric Selland – having originally been published in Japanese in 2012. And what an intriguing title! The concept is equally interesting. The unnamed (I think) narrator has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His life is quite narrow – his mother has died, he is estranged from his father and recently broken up from a woman he loves. The only creature in his life is a little cat called Cabbage. Reeling from this news, the narrator is visited by the Devil, who appears as his doppelgänger and informs him that he only has one day to live. But…

“There is something we could do…”

“Do? What do you mean?”

“Well, you could call it a kind of magic. But it might increase your life span.”

“Really?”

“On one condition: you’ll have to accept this one fundamental law of the universe.”

“And what is?”

“In order to gain something you have to lose something.”

“So what do I have to do exactly?”

“It’s easy… I’ll just ask you to perform a simple exchange.”

“Exchange?”

“Sure… All you have to do is remove one thing from the world, and in return, you get one more day of life.”

At first, he thinks he can simply get rid of things that don’t matter – the dust from the top of his bookcase, for instance. But he quickly learns that the devil is the one who makes suggestions, and he simply has to agree whether or not to take the bargain offered.

The first one, which he accepts, is phones.

I was a bit disappointed by this book, if I’m honest. My favourite bits were when (rather inexplicably) the cat starts speaking – there’s a lot of humour in the fact that he picked up language from period dramas and speaks very formally. But I don’t think Kawamura makes much of his premise. All the phones in the world disappear overnight, and the only problem highlighted is that the narrator finds it tricky to meet up with someone. Surely if phones stopped existing, businesses around the world would collapse, the economy would nosedive, all sorts of extraordinary things would happen. In Kawamura’s hands, it’s just as though the narrator is the only one to suffer an inconvenience – even though it is spelled out that it’s universal.

Towards the end, If Cats Disappeared From the World does take on the Alchemist-school of being basically a novelised fridge magnet. At one point, someone even says ‘Being alive doesn’t matter all that much on its own. How you live is more important.’

This could have been a really quirky, dark, strange little book – but it sort of ended up more like a Facebook inspirational quote. A shame.

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

The other one is The Cat Who Saved Books (2017), translated by Louise Heal Kawai in 2021 and given to me by my friend Lorna last year. Cats! Books! What a combo. And it’s set in a delightful old bookshop, run by a boy called Rintaro since his grandfather’s death. One day a talking cat gets him to go on various quests that mysteriously appear in the back of the shop, which expands out into unknown worlds…

There are various semi-nemeses to defeat, including this guy whose views on rereading hit a bit too close to home for me:

“The world is full of books, you agree? It’s impossible to count the number of books that have been, and are still being, written. To find the time to read the same books over again – well, it’s just inconceivable.”

And his views on book hoarding enrage Rintaro…

“But that’s how I’ve elevated my status – by collecting all these books. The more books you have, the more powerful you are. That’s how I got to where I am.”

“And is that why you’ve imprisoned them? To show them off as if their power belongs entirely to you?” Rintaro asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You think you’re so impressive – you built this ridiculous, pretentious showroom just so that everyone can see how many books you’ve read.”

I don’t think I have masses to say about this book. It’s basically a fun little quest-narrative which some enjoyable observations about readers and reading along the way, but felt very like a young adult book. It rattled along but didn’t leave all that much of an impression on me, if I’m honest.

Fingers crossed I can manage one more book for Reading the Meow before the week ends on Sunday…