But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers – from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. The cat orbits Tokyo’s denizens, drawing them ever closer.
Comment: I got interested in this book the last time I've visited my local library. I tend to like books with quirky characters - is not a cat one? - and I've checked the blurb so I knew the setting would be in Japan. Adding cats, and Japan and having read previous stories featuring Japanese characters made me curious about this one too!
In this book we have a multitude of characters and their lives becoming intertwined as everyone goes on about their days in Tokyo. The point in common is a cat, apparently walking without direction from place to place. As the cat passes by or briefly interacts with strangers, we get to know more about who they are and why their lives have gotten to be that way. At first it seems as if the connection is just the cat, but the more we read, the more links start to become visible among all the characters, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not...
This is the first book I try by this author. I had not heard about him nor this book before finding it in the library but the theme caught my eye. I think it is inevitable that the inclusion of a cat and the setting being in Japan would make me have some pre conceived idea about what type of story this would be and, in part, I wasn't surprised that this was a quirky and sometimes odd novel, but I also expected to be more impressed, having had previously a very good experience with a read featuring the exact same themes.
This book wasn't as linear as I imagined. It's true we can see a sequence of events or of situations described but this felt more like a collection of vignettes or short entries, which the author attempted to put together using the cat as connection. That's fine, author's artistic licence and all that, but I think the method feels jarring, too obvious and the characters too isolated, even when we are told how they interact or how they have more in common than what seemed real. Actually, this graphic way of presenting the text reminded me of another book by a Japanese author, which I didn't like as much as the one I referenced in the link above.
To be honest, I can't remember all the characters and/or their stories. I keep thinking about the taxi driver, who was my favorite character and Flo, the translator, because of some of the issues she mentions about her work and her being in a very different country, culturally wise. I think this is what I can sort of identify with the most, although I have not lived in a foreign country, but the words and what is said feels very realistic. What made me think about the story the most was this and the fact everyone is kid of alone - sometimes even lonely too - and while I can understand people in Japan are not as demonstrative as in other countries, it still feels weird.
The writing isn't hard to go through but I can't tell if the author wanted to be different by adding other types of graphic information such as a small manga story or if this was truly the only way the story could be told. Then, later on, some situations become more relatable - to how I was reading, at least - and others felt more emotional. I thought the end would be more along the lines of a more traditional type of novel, but I will admit I was confused by some of the cat related scenes. I would not say everything was too weird, but some details definitely were.
I've seen some readers commenting on the way Japanese culture was portrayed and that it isn't as fair as it should and of course I can't say so, but I agree some stories mentioned things which sound a bit too much like clichés or perhaps he might have exaggerated what could be simply scant but was made to look as if it was a given among all Japanese people. There were two or three stories which I actually disliked and some weren't very memorable.
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