Takashi Hiraide

THE SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo. They work at home as freelance writers. They no longer have very much to say to one another. One day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. She is a beautiful creature. She leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. New, small joys accompany the cat; the days have more light and colour. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife; they go walking together, talk and share stories of the cat and its little ways, play in the nearby Garden. But then something happens that will change everything again.The Guest Cat is an exceptionally moving and beautiful novel about the nature of life and the way it feels to live it. Written by Japanese poet and novelist Takashi Hiraide, the book won Japan's Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, and was a bestseller in France and America.

The Guest Cat

** spoiler alert **
           Somehow it ended up taking me ages to finish this novel because I personally found it a little boring. I liked the beginning, then at some point it just started to seem like a bunch of different occurrences strung together. The pretentious vocabulary and boring themes such as economy and real estate were just topics I hadn’t expected from this novel that I’d thought to be wholesome and cozy. Either way I still appreciated the story in itself.

isabelle

A lovely novella of how a cat brings joy to a couple, and the struggle with finding an  affordable place to live in Japan.

altlovesbooks

"For me, Chibi is a friend with whom I share an understanding, and who just happens to have taken on the form of a cat."

This was very much a Japanese fiction book. There is no plot, exactly, so it's going to be hard for me to say definitively if you'd like this book. It's a slice of life fiction book revolving around a couple who rent a guest house from a wealthy couple. A cat owned by another neighbor further down their alley wanders in from time to time, and the book is, on its surface, about their interactions with the cat and the impact the cat, Chibi, has on their lives. If you dig a bit deeper, the book seems to be more about the ephemeral in your life, things like cicadas, dragonflies, winter, summer, life and death, that sort of thing. Trying to hold onto that which you can't control can hold you back rather than let you progress.

I was prepared to not like this book, particularly after (late book spoilers) (view spoiler)[Chibi dies (hide spoiler)]. Instead, while I don't think it would make a favorites list of mine, it did make me think a bit. In typical Japanese literature form, the writing is lyrical, beautiful, and conjures up images almost effortlessly. I really, really, *really* wish I lived in their guesthouse, for instance. I also appreciated (once someone in the reviews here pointed it out) that while the cat, Chibi, is named, our narrator and his wife never are. Neither are any other humans mentioned by name, only by description, or by letter abbreviation. That's a neat touch.

A wonderful sui generis novel about a visiting cat who brings joy into a couple’s life in Tokyo A bestseller in France and winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. It leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. Soon they are buying treats for the cat and enjoying talks about the animal and all its little ways. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife — the days have more light and color. The novel brims with new small joys and many moments of staggering poetic beauty, but then something happens…. As Kenzaburo Oe has remarked, Takashi Hiraide’s work "really shines." His poetry, which is remarkably cross-hatched with beauty, has been acclaimed here for "its seemingly endless string of shape-shifting objects and experiences,whose splintering effect is enacted via a unique combination of speed and minutiae."

Julie Kristine Veaas

This book is about ordinary people living ordinary lives - until a cat comes in and changes their life. Originally not a cat person, the husband grows fond of Chibi. The wife even forgives her after attacking her for food! But then suddenly she stops appearing - ans they find out she has died 😭 the story about grieving and getting back to life and finding another cat to love whilst never forgetting the first one was beautiful and very relateable!

Lauren B

As much as I wanted to like this book, the magic did not happen for me. I found this book rather flat and boring. I came here to meet a cat and was expecting a cute, emotional story but nothing much happened. The chapters were super short (sometimes only 3-4 pages long) and that made the reading too choppy for me to really immerse myself in the story. The descriptions focused mostly about uninteresting things like the number of legs a giant mantis shrimp has... I don't really understand what the author wanted to convey but it did not reach me. Not enough cat and a very forgettable story unfortunately.

Laura Dobie

Touchingly observed tale of the relationship which develops between a Japanese couple and the cat that comes to visit them.

The Guest Cat

Reviews