Tag: book

Another book I received at Christmas Eve’s book exchange was We’ll Prescribe You A Cat by Syou Ishida, translated from the original Japanese by Emmie Madison Shimoda. It’s apparently won all kinds of acclaim and awards and what-have-you, so I was hoping for something pretty spectacular.

It’s… pretty good, I guess? Less a novel, it’s more like a collection of short stories with an overarching theme, within which a deeper plot which spans them all begins to emerge… but is never entirely resolved.

That repeating theme might be summed up as this: a person goes to visit a clinic – often under the illusion that it’s a psychiatric specialist – where, after briefly discussing their problems with the doctor, they’re prescribed a dose of “cat” for some number of days. There’s a surprising and fun humour in the prescription, each time: the matter-of-fact way that the doctor dispenses felines as if they were medications and resulting reactions of his nonplussed patients. Fundamentally, a prescription of cat works, and by the time the cat is returned to the clinic, its caretaker is cured, albeit not necessarily in the way in which they would have originally expected.

Standing alone, each chapter short story is excellent. The writing is compelling and rich and the characters well-developed, particularly in the short timeframes in which we get to know each of them. There’s a lot of interesting bits of Japanese culture represented, too, which – as an outsider – piqued my curiosity: whether by the careful work of the author or her translator it never left me feeling lost, although I suspect there might be a few subtler points I missed as a result of my geographic bias¹.

The characters (whether human, feline, or… otherwise…?) and their situations are quirky and amusing, and there are a handful of heart-warming… and heart-wrenching… moments that I thoroughly enjoyed. But by the time I was half-way through the book, I was becoming invested in a payoff that would never come to be delivered. The nature of the doctor, his receptionist, and their somewhat-magical clinic is never really resolved, and the interconnections between the patients is close to non-existent, leaving the book feeling like a collection of tales that are related to… but not connected to… one another. As much as I’d enjoyed every story – and I did! – I nonetheless felt robbed of the opportunity to wrap up the theme that they belong to.

Instead, we’re given just more unanswered questions: hints at the nature of the clinic and its occupants, ideas that skirt around ideas of magic and ghosts, and no real explanation. Maybe the author’s planning to address it in the upcoming sequel, but unless I’m confident that’s the case, I’ll probably skip it.

In summary: some beautifully-written short stories with a common theme and a fun lens on Japanese culture, particularly likely to appeal to a cat lover, but with no payoff for getting invested in the overarching plot.

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