When the narrator, a young postman is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and commences his bucket list, it isn’t long before the devil appears in the form of a doppelganger. The recipient of his last phone call is his first girlfriend who works and lives in a movie theatre It is when Kawamura uses specific details or tells us that the origin of the Japanese word for cat, “neko”, is actually “’a sleeping child’” (same sound, different choice of kanji characters)” that the novel surges to life. There weren’t many surprises for this cat lover but it was lovely to find out eventually that that “whole other word” is “Neko-Manma”. But the devil is in the detail and the devil is, of course, central to this story of mortality, a blend of Faust with It's a Wonderful Life. It's hard to know what part translation has played here as it is always harder to translate a demotic voice from one language to another. But seemingly I haven't gone wrong because when the unnamed protagonist's cat Cabbage begins to speak halfway through the novel, he reveals he doesn't like this food either.Ĭabbage's voice is a little clichéd he speaks "like an upper class gentleman. I wondered again where I went wrong with my cat-rearing. It's just not the same as human food – we humans are way fussier." This was news to me, under pressure as I am every day to rustle up at least three innovative meals for my cats.
Fans of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles will also surely love If Cats Disappeared from the World.At the beginning of Genki Kawamura's magic tale If Cats Disappeared from the World, we're told that "In Japanese, there's a whole other word for the food pets eat.
This beautiful tale is translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland, who also translated The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. Genki Kawamura's If Cats Disappeared from the World is a story of loss and reconciliation, of one man's journey to discover what really matters in modern life.
īecause how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself - and his beloved cat - to the brink. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor's diagnosis that he has only months to live. A beautifully moving tale of loss and reaching out to the ones we love, of one man's journey to discover what really matters in modern life.
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