Neil Hopcroft

[Paperback read aloud to Adelle]

If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura

At first glance this is another gentle Japanese cat book. We follow the story of a postman and his cat, Cabbage. He is diagnosed with terminal cancer and makes a deal with the devil to extend his life.

Several deals, in fact. The devil will remove something from the world in exchange for an extra day of life – he gets one last day to appreciate the thing to be removed.

This bargain leaves him thinking about who and what is important in his life. This leads him to some difficult and unusual choices, looking back at his life with his family, especially the last holiday he took with his mum, the imperfection of which brought his family closer together.

There was a point at which the stakes were too high and he could no longer deal with the devil, he couldn’t countenance the removal of joy from the rest of the world for merely another day for himself.

The gentle joy of his relationship with Cabbage is set against a backdrop of memories and thoughts about what it means to be dying. This is not a happy book, and offered me some challenges to think about how I would react in his situation. Maybe I’ll write more about that another time, not that I have the focus of a known imminent demise to clarify those thoughts.