Much of this somewhat reverse-Faustian novel seems predictable from the start.
We know from the title that cats will be one of the devil’s demands, and we can also assume that it won’t be the first, or second, but eventually, it’ll come. “When I found out, the first thing that occurred to me was that I was only one stamp away from getting a free massage on my loyalty card.” The devil is the one to make the demands our narrator then accepts and lives with the consequences, or doesn’t.
This devil offers our narrator an extra day of life for each thing in the world he is willing to sacrifice.īelieving at first he could simply choose to vanish a stain here or a rock there, he gladly accepts the devil’s demands, only to then be shocked when the actual honest-to-god capital D Devil proves to be -spoilers- deceptive. Upon returning home to his cat Cabbage, he is greeted by a happy Hawaiian-shirted version of himself claiming to be the devil. Our narrator – a film-loving, cat-owning, thirty-year-old everyman – is, in the book’s opening chapter, informed that he will soon be killed by a stage IV brain tumour he had no idea was hiding in there. Fans of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles will also love If Cats Disappeared from the World.Pictured with our beloved Millie. 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.
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