If Cats Disappeared From The World – Genki Kawamura

If Cats Disappeared From The World is a contemporary Japanese re-telling of the Faustian bargain, using magical realism to ask philosophical questions about what makes life worth living and what we owe to ourselves and to each other. It’s a slim little novel for such a weighty subject, one that you could easily knock over in an afternoon but will probably be thinking about for days. My edition was translated from Genki Kawamura’s original Japanese into English by Eric Selland.

The story is set over the course of what the unnamed narrator describes as a “weird week”. It begins with him, a 30 year old mailman, unable to shake a lingering cold bug. He visits a doctor, only to be told he has Stage 4 brain cancer, and can expect to die imminently.

So, naturally, he scurries home to start contemplating his mortality. Suddenly, the Devil appears in front of him, a doppelgänger wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Ray Bans. The Devil offers him one more guaranteed day of life, in exchange for making something disappear from the world. The narrator thinks it over, and tries to find a loophole by suggesting the Devil disappear something like the mould in his bathroom, or the dust on his bookshelf. The Devil ain’t having it. He wants a real sacrifice.

At the Devil’s urging, the man agrees to make all phones disappear in exchange for a one day extension of his lifespan. To everyone’s great surprise, it works, and living in a world without phones isn’t half bad. The Devil makes the same offer again, and this time it’s movies that are disappeared (his ex-girlfriend’s favourite thing in the world). The following day, it’s clocks (his father’s only source of income).

For a while, all these deals with the Devil seem justified. Sure, living without a phone or a clock is a bit annoying, but surely it’s worth it for the narrator to live just a little longer?

The narrator only balks when the Devil proposes another deal to make cats disappear from the world. The narrator’s only companion in the world is a black and white cat named Cabbage, the last living connection he has to his late mother and the only living being in the world who will be truly impacted by his own death. So, he’s forced to ask himself: is it worth it? Disappearing Cabbage – and all other cats – for one extra day in a world without clocks and phones and movies?

Oh, and the cat starts talking a bit. It’s a Japanese novel, after all.

If Cats Disappeared From The World unfolds through ebbs and flows, with each ‘deal’ prompting the narrator to re-examine his past and wonder what the future will look like without him in it. Flashbacks reveal why he broke up with the movie-loving ex-girlfriend, and scenes in the present show his fumbling attempts to reconnect in light of his death sentence. His relationship (or lack thereof) with his parents is explored in much the same way.

It’s an interesting philosophical novella, one that falls smack bang in the middle of Paulo Coelho and Haruki Murakami. Pick up If Cats Disappeared From The World when you’re in a pensive mood but short on time.

My favourite Amazon reviews of If Cats Disappeared From The World:

• “Maybe this is a children’s book or written by the author when he was 12 years old. Maybe the translator failed miserably. As it is the best thing about the book is the pic of the cat on the book cover.” – ailurophileg
• “What seemed like a good story line was instead a flat version painfully articulated through the depiction of boring characters and equally boring events.” – Christine
• “Story of a dying person should move you and in my case it did. I move from the bed to move the book from the bedside table to the shelf without even completing it.” – Placeholder
• “This man is unappealing and unsympathetic – the world is better off without him in it.” – Charles Pooter