How litters of Japanese kittens took over American books
In Japan, Feb. 22 is National Cat Day — the Japanese words for two and meow sound alike, so 2/22 is meow-meow-meow day. But for American publishers, every day seems worth celebrating as Japanese cat day. An apparently limitless supply of translations featuring felines on the cover now lines the shelves of any given bookstore.
The latest litter of Japanese cat-themed books arrived this year as the trend shows no sign of abating. There is “Welcome to the Kokoro Cat Clinic,” “The Messenger Cat Cafe” and “Every Bookshop Needs a Cat” — not to be confused with “The Nine Lives of a Bookshop Cat.” The cats aren’t confined to any one genre: Fans can pick up a stray Japanese crime novel, like “A Game of Cat and Killer.”
The most recent offering is a new literary memoir: Haruki Murakami’s “Abandoning a Cat.”
Murakami, long considered Japan’s sorest snub for the Nobel Prize in Literature, is not merely hopping on the fuzzy bandwagon. While this may be his first titular feline, Murakami’s long-time translator, Philip Gabriel, told The Post “his love of cats is well known.”
Cats appear throughout Murakami’s novels, acting “as a kind of portal to another reality or dimension” or a “catalyst for the character to explore other realities” in works such as “Kafka on the Shore,” “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “1Q84.” In this new memoir, readers learn for the first time the personal backstory of the author’s cat-affection.
Murakami is not alone in this literary preoccupation. Nick Bradley, an academic and author of his own “The Cat and The City,” wrote his PhD on the “purrthetic fallacy” of cats in Japanese literature. Bradley said the feline presence dates back a millennium: “The Tale of Genji,” frequently called the world’s oldest novel, was written by a Japanese noblewoman a thousand years ago and features a cat in a key role.
During a pivotal scene, the cat bursts through a screen meant to conceal a princess, revealing her to a man and setting in motion a disastrous affair. This plot twist, and the cat at its center, became one of the tale’s most famous tableaus, frequently illustrated in manuscript scrolls and later paintings.
Something of this tradition is evoked by the multi-page spreads of cat drawings in Murakami’s “Abandoning a Cat,” which help to expand what was previously a magazine article across a few pages of The New Yorker into paperback form, the content itself basically unchanged.
The mystique of cats dates even further back in Japanese history than “The Tale of Genji.” They are not indigenous to the nation, instead arriving on the ships of Buddhist missionaries in the sixth century, and employed in temples to catch rodents that tended to nibble on the scriptures.
These semi-religious connotations and the animal’s rarity quickly made cats popular pets among the nobility. They continue to roam the halls of power: The current emperor of Japan owns two rescues, and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has professed she’s a cat person.
The aristocratic cat was spun into a work of biting political satire in Natsume Soseki’s 1905 novel “I Am a Cat,” with a sardonic feline narrator critiquing Western influences in Japanese society.
The book was so influential that it is credited with the sustained popularity of the archaic personal pronoun wagahai (a Japanese equivalent of the royal we), which was used to signify the cat’s pompousness. It is now used by Mario and Luigi’s arch-nemesis, Bowser.
More than a hundred years later, Soseki’s cat is getting the star treatment once again as the result of the latest fad. Nick Bradley was commissioned to write a new translation, which was published last year, under the banner “Discover the original Japanese Cat classic!”
American publishers seem to be combing through the back catalogue of any Japanese literature that mentions cats. “I think publishers have found this sweet spot of Japan plus cat,” Bradley told The Post. “They have this marketable package, and now that’s what they’re actively going out trying to find.”
The Japanese literary cat really took off in the 1990s, when it became the de facto mascot of iyashikei or “healing” literature: cozy, whimsical stories without much peril (or plot), designed to comfort the reader. The genre’s explosion followed two Japanese disasters in 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake and a chemical attack in the Tokyo subway system, which was the subject of Murakami’s investigative book “Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.”
This warm and fuzzy species of book seems to have particularly resonated with American readers in the years since the COVID pandemic, perhaps in a similar reflex to seek comfort amid societal turmoil.
The specific healing properties of cats are promised explicitly in the 2024 novel “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat” and last year’s sequel, in case the first has not cured you, “We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat.”
American readers have come to expect that Japanese literary cats will enjoy uninterrupted coziness, and have become extremely sensitive to the cat characters experiencing any sort of threat. Sometimes publishers churning out books to meet the demand for cat content fall afoul of the snuggly tastes American readers have now acquired.
Kiyoshi Shigematsu is a bestselling author in Japan, but his only book translated into English is “The Blanket Cats,” presumably because of its extra-cozy title. It is a short-story collection exploring the darker sides of human nature, but American publishers nevertheless persisted in marketing the fuzzy cat angle. This was met with outcry from readers who delivered the ultimate admonishment in online reviews: “I fear it may not have been written by a cat lover.”
It appears the literary popularity of cats in the Anglophone publishing world may have now outpaced even their domestic appeal in Japan. “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” the first in a series by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, was published in America in 2020 with a cover almost identical to the Japanese edition, except for the addition of an apparently mandatory cat illustration.
The story contains no mention of a cat, but nevertheless, the little brown cat now features prominently on the cover of every subsequent volume in the English editions. And this “cat-baiting” was a success: The books have gone on to sell more than 7.5 million copies globally.
While the strategy evidently boosts sales, publishers risk courting the ire of cat-fanatic readers. One-star reviews of cat-baiting books online speak to their sense of betrayal: “Where the hell are the cats?” “This is false advertisement.” “Needed more cats.”
Americans are known to read notably little fiction in translation compared with other publishing markets, so the catnip may offer the comforting familiarity needed to attract them to unfamiliar literary terrain.
“Abandoning a Cat” is a meditative portrait about Murakami’s father and his experiences in the Second World War, famously not a cozy historical event. This has not deterred the publisher from cheerfully advertising the book as “a moving reflection on the author’s father — plus a cat!”
Those who are already fans of Murakami’s past work will be rewarded with deeper insight into the source of cats’ mysterious allure in his fiction. The memoir tells the real-life story behind a cat that appears elsewhere in his novels, providing illustrative backstory. But it also has much more than cats to offer.
- Admin
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