Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!
I heard about this novel on Bookstagram a few months ago, and I was immediately hooked by the premise. I’ve been trying to read more translated literature when I can, and I’ve found…enough Japanese books about cats that it seems to be a certified Thing. (Nothing compares to The Traveling Cat Chronicles, though. That’s the peak, as far as I’m concerned.) And I’m not complaining. Short and sweet, She and Her Cat was a heartwarming examination of loneliness, womanhood, and the love we have for our cats.
Enjoy this week’s review!
She and Her Cat – Makoto Shinkai & Naruki Nagakawa (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
In four interconnected short stories, four women face hardships as they learn to grapple with adulthood. Dealing with isolation, misogyny, and troubles with love, these women have no one to turn to…save for their feline companions, who are there to help them along the way. But it turns out that the lives of our cats are more complex than we could ever know…
TW/CW: sexual harassment, cheating, death/grief themes, mental illness themes
Strangely, in my ongoing search for novels in translation to read, I always end up coming back to Japanese novels about cats. (To be fair, they’ve had varying premises—and degrees of quality.) However, I think this one is unique in its approach—it focuses on the cats and the humans in equal measure, which was an interesting move. I feel like the voice of the cats (who were anthropomorphized) was properly distinguished from the humans, and their perspective on how the humans lived was wry and cute. I will say, I feel like they were almost too human and understood too much about the human world, but I can give it somewhat of a pass since it was fairly cute. Similarly, I loved the women in the novel, and how refreshingly ordinary they felt. These characters felt like an antidote to every female character that the author describes as “plain” but is actually somehow the height of conventional attractiveness and can do everything; She and Her Cat’s human characters, however, felt like ordinary strangers people with relatable issues that they processed with the help of their feline companions.
She and Her Cat hit an excellent balance of coziness for me. There’s a line that cozy fiction/magical realism of this brand often crosses, where the “coziness” transforms from a more lighthearted, low-stakes story about more positive themes to something that becomes preachy in said themes, without any regard for the reader’s intelligence. (Fluff is fluff, but I maintain that I get irked every time an adult novel still has a “and what did we learn today, kids?” moment.) But although She and Her Cat could’ve walked straight into that trap, it avoided this pitfall with ease. The short stories within this novel were simply quiet tales of isolation, perseverance, womanhood, and the bond that we have with our cats, which is exactly the kind of stakes that a cozy novel should have—all that, and every theme isn’t spelled out for you. (Yes, I know, the bar is low, but you’d be surprised at how many times I’ve run into this…with Japanese cozy books about cats, specifically. If I had a nickel, etc., etc.)
That being said, even though this was magical realism, I didn’t quite feel that magic through the writing. I’m once again returning to the problem of “are my issues with the writing the author’s or the translator’s fault?” that I’ll never solve because…well, I’m not fluent in Japanese. Though I liked the narrative voice, the prose itself was pretty bare-bones, only describing the events as they happened in a way that was rather rote. And this is a story where you get to glimpse the world through the eyes of cats, animals that have an entirely different perception on life than we do! Additionally, I didn’t get as much of a view into the setting and the characters as I wanted to, since the writing went from point A to point B more often than not. Since She and Her Cat is a short novel (under 200 pages), there was definitely room for some more vibrant prose that would’ve made the setting and characters feel more alive. I think part of that might have been a consequence of the fact that She and Her Cat was adapted from a manga, but I feel like filling in the gaps that the art left should’ve been one of the main concerns of the team adapting this novel. If this was the result, it almost feels like they only adapted the script, and not the rest of the manga.
Additionally, although this is a short story, a lot of the events felt quite rushed. I think I would’ve gotten more out of She and Her Cat emotionally if I had more time to spend with each cat and character. Although we have the through lines between the story, they were shoved in so haphazardly that any previous development didn’t mean anything for the next story, even though we had characters that could’ve potentially undergone the slightest bit more development. Like the prose, this novel had the pacing both in-story and between stories go from Point A and Point B very quickly. The appearances of characters from previous stories were so rushed that they felt like MCU post-credits scenes: oh, hey, you know this person, right? Alright, anyway, onto the next thing…
But in the end, She and Her Cat is a somewhat lighthearted and short book, so I get it that fully fleshed-out narratives weren’t exactly the goal.
All in all, a sweet anthology that excelled in creating an emotional atmosphere with its stories, but faltered in places with its prose and pacing. 3.5 stars!
She and Her Cat is a standalone, and was adapted from the Manga by Makoto Shinkai. Makoto Shinkai is also the author of several manga series, including the your name. series, Weathering With You, The Garden of Words, and many more. Naruki Nagawa is also the author of Prince of Stride.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 