This is by Hiro Arikawa, and it was originally published in 2012. The English translation, by Philip Gabriel, came out in 2017. Arikawa had written plenty of books before, but this was her first international hit.

A cat.

A cat that travels.

A cat that travels in JAPAN...

Really, there's nothing not to like there, we thought, especially as the cover is adorable. So we decided this would be our next "real book to both read".


The jacket illustration is by Shuai Liu. This cat actually doesn't resemble Nana, but the designers felt he was just too beautiful to miss


Gorgeous endpapers...

The book's first sentences quote the opening of Natsume Soseki's I Am a Cat: "I am a cat. As yet I have no name." But Nana (Arikawa's feline hero) does have a name, albeit one he doesn't like, he tells us, because it sounds feminine. It means "seven" in Japanese, and Nana's human, Satoru Miyawaki (our other hero), was reminded of the number seven by the crooked shape of the cat's tail. The name also carries on a tradition, because cat-loving goes back a long way in this young man's heart, and he once belonged to Hachi (meaning eight), whose two forehead spots had reminded him of that number.

It took me a little while to sync into the rhythm and tone of the book. At first I wasn't sure I liked it, and wondered if it were just a little too sweet and cutesie. But it rapidly grew on me as I started to recognize its strengths.

(A couple of reviewers, incidentally, mention the same change of heart. Ilana Masad, for example, starts negative, and then realizes that SHE is the problem: "My busy, cynical, constantly enraged mind didn't know what to do with a book that was, at its core, joyful." Lynne Truss admits: "I’ve rarely changed my mind so much about a book in the course of reading it...")


There are lovely illustrations throughout. I'm not sure who they're by

One of those strengths that I mentioned is the structure, which involves a recurring scenario. When Satoru finds himself reluctantly obliged to rehome his beloved Nana (we don't find exactly why until later), they set off together in Satoru's silver van, crisscrossing Japan, and calling at the homes of various friends who have tentatively expressed a willingness to take the cat in. We see the journey and the arrival; then we catch up with a bit of the back-story of each of these hosts; and then -- because none seems quite right for Nana -- the cat/man pair moves on again.

But at each place the kind and gentle Satoru seems to work a sort of magic, healing fraught situations, or pouring reassurance into wounded souls. It's not heavily psychological, this book, but it makes you feel compassion for your fellow human beings. So often, they've been caught in family traps not of their own making (dealing with overbearing fathers, for instance, or parents who are too busy with their jobs to bother with their children, or parents who are snatched away by death). Or they stuff up their own relationships (perhaps through insecurity or jealousy). Satoru has that rare gift for smoothing things out, rather than riling them up further.

Willow Heath puts this beautifully: "The weight of each friend’s burden is palpable. Every one of them carries a secret, an anchor, a ghost piggybacking on their shoulder. And when we have spent just enough time with them to feel the chill of that ghost ourselves, we leave along with Satoru."

It's gently done, but it is surprisingly effective.

Given the constant moving on, this is also a quest novel. Which is its second strength. There are some lovely descriptions of Japan: Nana's first encounter with the (very scary) sea; his first view of Mt Fuji (big tick); his first experience of Hokkaido (must go there...)

And there are some great evocations of what it is that makes travel so precious. There's a moment when Nana feels "we were without doubt the greatest travellers in the world. And I was the world's greatest travelling cat." I think we've all felt that sometimes as travellers. We don't have to be doing anything hugely bold or unprecedented. But somehow we suddenly feel we're the luckiest people in the world.


Memories of Japan... This is Kyoto. It's while Satoru is on a school trip there that his parents are killed in a car crash, which means Hachi has to be rehomed


Hachi goes to live in Kokura, and on another school trip, Satoru tries to visit him: "From Hakata Station in Fukuoka to Kokura was about twenty minutes by the Shinkansen train..." We took the Sonic, but otherwise...

It was fortunate that Nana turned out to be a car-happy cat... We've had cats that were, and cats that spectacularly weren't. But I guess Nana speaks for many of us when he says: "I thought it would be great if we could travel together like this for the rest of our lives."


This is Sarah T. Whitepaws, the most gregarious and inquisitive of our cats, towards the end of her little furry life. Like Nana, she was happy to sit on the front seat of the car, and brace herself on her front paws so she could look out of the window



The book's third strength is definitely the voice of Nana himself. He's not quite as acerbic as Soseki's cat. But he also brooks no nonsense, and looks down, from an appropriate height and often with bemused indulgence, at the antics of the crazy humans that surround him. He's a soft old thing, though, under his huffy, prickly, smart-arse exterior. And he's very sensitive to mood, as cats so often are.

Arikawa clearly knows the bond that humans form with felines:

"It was a very special thing -- to have your own cat in your own home... Feeling the weight of a cat's paws pressing into your shoulders in the middle of the night -- not much beats that."


"Hachi was a very kind cat." Our youngest, Ellan M. Notail (aka Kitty), was an incredibly kind cat, sensing your fear or sadness, and doing her best to make you feel better


"Cats the world over prefer to discover things they like on their own and rarely go for anything that's been provided for them..." This is Alexis I. Owlface, the most independent of our cats (guess what the "I" stands for...). She was shy and wary (we think she'd had a troubled past), so it was all the more gratifying when she learned to trust us

I'll say no more about the story.

But it's worth recalling, says John Butler, that the Japanese have a long history of writing about cats: "In Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book (1002) the Emperor Ichijo, who was the earliest Japanese emperor (or anyone else of note in Japan) to own one, loses his cat at one point, and everyone has to go and look for it." Cats crop up regularly in the work of Haruki Murakami as well, and then there's The Guest Cat, by Takashi Hiraide. Books didn't often get a whole post to themselves back then, but that one did...

"As we count up the memories from one journey, we head off on another," says Nana in the closing section. Which is true. Even if there are times of quiescence, they're part of the journey too.

And it's the same with books, I guess. Count up the memories. Let them do their unique work, conscious and subconscious, in the Petri dish that is You, and then head off again into the next sea of print.