The Guest Cat: Takashi Hiraide

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Takashi is a professor of Art Science and Poetics as well as a core member of the new Institute for Art Anthropology at Tama Art University.

It isn� Hiraide has written numerous books of poetry and several books of genre-bending essays, including one on poetics and baseball. With certain authors, such as Flaubert or Wilde, a certain lack of content can be forgiven in light of their artistry with words, but it is hard to defend a story that says very little without that beauty. I’m not a fan of sentimentality, but the narrator’s precise and clinical prose gave the impression of detachment, even when the words themselves suggested otherwise. On the other hand, I love the picture on the cover, and the small format and thick paper of my copy felt delightfully suitable.

A winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award captures life’s ephemeral nature in a tender narrative about a Tokyo couple’s attachment to a neighbor’s cat.

A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copyediting, and no longer have very much to say to one another. in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter. The cat too has a personality of its own, like how the cat is clever enough to keep the humans especially the couple eager to make them hear the sound of her voice, how she never lets the couple touch her or pet her, how she is clever enough to know the exclusive entry made for her to the couple's house and how she plays with the ping pong ball is enough to fill the readers' hearts with glowing happiness from inside out. The Guest Cat’, or Chibi, was a real cat, who came into the young couple’s lives much in the same way as Fortuna, or these literary cats as portents of change. The aspect of the I-novel characterises the way the Japanese handle the ‘I,’ the way they submerge the subject in descriptions of nature and daily life.On the other hand, whenever I read a book with cats in it, I find myself crying, but I can’t stop reading them. In The Guest Cat, whether due to a lack of financial stability or simply out of preference, the couple are childless and never mention the possibility of having a baby. They feature frequently in Japanese literature as narrators, such as in So- seki Natsume’s ‘I am a Cat’, or as omens, as in many books written by Haruki Murakami.