Neil Hopcroft

We’ll prescribe you a cat by Syou Ishida

[Read aloud to Adelle]

It seems there is quite a collection of Japanese cat books, this one is again a fiction, following the story of a mysterious clinic and some the patients that visit it.

They each find the clinic through hearsay and approach when they have given up with other options. The clinic, run by a doctor and a nurse, provides each with a cat and some instructions about how to care for it.

In each case the cat resolves the troubles in the patients lives in a way only a cat could, often inducing some kind of familial trauma on the way.

As the book goes on the clinic seems to get weirder and weirder, with clues about the clinics origin being given throughout, until the end of the book where the mystery clarifies somewhat, albeit without actual explanation.

This is ‘kawaii neko no hon’ (cute cat book) in the Japanese style, there is gentle trauma for many of the characters but nothing that cannot be resolved with the application of a cat. There is loss, confusion, coming to terms, family discord, jibes at Kyoto accents and buildings that seem to move around.

The translation here sometimes produces slightly weird ways of describing things, with some of the interactions between people seemingly missing nuance that would be available in the original language, although that may be as much about that nuance being unsaid before translation – it would be endemic in the society and not require saying.

If you are looking for a gentle cutesy book with little challenging emotion, this is a good book for you.