2022/154: The Cat and the City — Nick Bradley

...there it was, neko – cat. But it was different to how it was written normally. The normal way to write the character was 猫 – with this radical 犭 on the left. The character Ogawa had sent had 豸 on the left. That was the tanuki radical. This must be an older version, relating the cat to other shapeshifting animals like the badger, fox and tanuki. [loc. 1656]

A series of interlinked stories set in Tokyo, in what's turned out to be an alternate, Covid-free reality where the Tokyo Olympics of 2020 weren't postponed to 2021. The stories range from the tale of Ohashi, a homeless storyteller who's arrested and 'rehoused' in the pre-Olympic clearup (and who feeds tuna to a stray cat), via a rejected lover who lashes out at the cat who tries to offer comfort, to an agoraphobic and his young friend who care for the injured cat, to a young woman who's having the whole city tattooed on her back -- including a cat who seems to move through the tattoo ... Each story has a distinctive voice and style: the story of the agoraphobic and the boy who befriends him is a manga, while others are told in first or third person, present or past tense, deliberately 'literary' or briskly colloquial language. The stories connect their characters in ways that aren't always obvious: the moment when Ohashi almost encounters his estranged brother, the moment when Flo, the American translator, forgets her manuscript in a cat cafe ...

This reminded me of some of David Mitchell's fiction, not least because of the tenuous but significant connections between characters (and of course the Japanese setting). I appreciated the emotional and tonal range of the stories, and the inventiveness with which they were told; I liked the way the larger stories became clear gradually and without direct focus, like a Magic Eye picture; and I think I'll need to read again with an eye to the more esoteric aspects of the cat, which may be more than it seems.

I was charmed to discover that Bradley 'has a PhD focusing on the figure of the cat in the country’s literature' (source). His next novel, Four Seasons in Japan, is out in June 2023, and there is a cat on the cover ...

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo: purchased 02MAY21, animal on the cover.