The Goodbye Cat by Hiro Arikawa
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The Goodbye Cat
By Hiro Arikawa
Translated by Philip Gabriel
Berkley 2023
Pity the author who writes a beloved bestseller.
Simply writing a bestseller evokes no pity, of course. Simply writing a bestseller, something like The Godfather or anything by James Patterson, involves a straightforward swap: you provide readers with a faulty outline half-clothed in crappy prose, and in exchange they provide you with sloping heaps of money. It’s only when you add that word ‘beloved’ that the picture complicates.
A beloved classic is different. Book clubs savor it instead of gritting through mainly on the strength of white wine and gossip. Libraries can’t keep their pawed copies on the shelf. People embroider pillows with character names. Fully grown adults on their tenth re-read still break into tears on the crosstown local. It’s ghastly.
Hiro Arikawa wrote just such a beloved bestseller a few years ago with The Travelling Cat Chronicles, a wan thing that served up a few lukewarm stories about how quirky and wonderful cats are as pets. This would be odd enough, but the book also celebrated the weird people who enjoy the company of cats — and it was embraced by those people in all their appalling numbers. The Travelling Cat Chronicles became a beloved bestseller.
Unless the author of a beloved bestseller has the common courtesy to die young, there will inevitably be sequels, and Hiro Arikawa’s sequel to The Travelling Cat Chronicles is now available in an English-language translation by Philip Gabriel. The Goodbye Cat takes much the same approach as its predecessor, but in these seven stories, the destination is different: that undiscovered country from whose bourn no travelling cat returns. This is a book about cats coughing up hairy life-lessons and then dying. All of Yukata Murakami’s lovely illustrations feature living cats, but nobody’s perfect.
The book awws the furniture and twees all over everything. In “Bringing Up Baby,” the narrator (be strong: it’s a cat), named Kota wants to convince his human “brother” to repair a snag in his relationship with his father. In “Finding Hachi,” the cat owner gradually appreciates the fact that pets age faster than their masters. “Cat time and human time seemed to move at a different pace,” it reveals. “Around the moment he realized that cat time moved more quickly, Hachi had passed Satoru and was already a full grown adult.” This comes up a lot.
For the reader without Japanese, it’s murky who’s to blame for the fact that every one of these stories is full of cliches and other lazy language. Is Gabriel responsible for the fact that nearly every page of this book is choked with dumb, easy turns of phrase, or does Hiro Arikawa really write this kind of garbage prose on her own? Certainly the latter is conceivable: garbage prose is a hallmark of the beloved bestseller.
Effrontery is a rarer trait — these are essentially meek books — but there are occasional glimmers of it even in these dead-cat stories. In “Life is Not Always Kind,” for instance, one of the ur-texts of this kind of tripe is evoked directly. Allow me to introduce myself, I am a cat, says the narrator Nana: “That’s me trying to imitate the greatest-ever cat in Japan, the one in Natsume Soseki’s famous book I Am a Cat.” Nana goes on: “But introducing myself like this is a bit lame, because that cat didn’t have a name, whereas I do.”
Difficult as it is to speak ill of a book that’s full of dead and dying cats, The Goodbye Cat is sticky and manipulative stuff. But cat keepers will love it, and there’s no use speaking ill of beloved bestsellers in any case. They lounge around in the sunlight, occasionally stretching out a paw to knock better books off the bestseller lists just for the Hell of it.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.