Reviews

To be honest, I bought this book by mistake and only because it was about cats. As soon as I realized this was written in part by Makoto Shinkai, director of "Your Name" and "5 Centimeters per Second", I knew I wasn't going to like it because I am not a fan of his movies. Since I already owned the book and it was fairly short I still decided to give it a try and then get it out of my way. It went as well as I expected. Thankfully, the first story was the worst one and the others weren't as bad.

"She and her Cat" is a collection of four stories that connect with each other through certain characters. I liked the third story well enough and I enjoyed some aspects of the last story. That's the best thing I can say about this. This book managed to make me dislike cats, which I thought to be an impossible task.

The writing is not bad, but it isn't good either. It's just okay: simple and straightforward. The attempts at being profound in these stories fall flat and feel empty to me for the most part. I could consider that this issue might have been because of the translation but I always felt the same way about the dialogue in Shinkai's movies.

Shinkai's stories always seem to have a big emphasis on romance, which isn't my preferred genre to begin with and I care even less if the characters have little to no personality. Some of these characters do not have a romantic plot and I kept wondering if that is because of the other author of this book and if I have him to thank.

This will contain a few spoilers from now on, but honestly I don't think you should care because I do not recommend this. However, if you really really want to read this book and spoilers bother you maybe stop here.

The first story is about a young woman that finds a cat on the street and takes him home. The cat then falls in love with her (yes, you read that right). To make sure that the reader really gets this, a female cat asks the main cat in marriage and he refuses by saying he is in love with this human. The tendency to make the female characters run after male characters with the personality of a cardboard cutout is very annoying by the way. Other annoying this about this story are:

The main human character considers getting pregnant in order to make the man she is seeing marry her;
The main cat character thinking that a human girl is not his type because she doesn't wear makeup and has short hair. As a friend commented "why would cats care about makeup?" This isn't just any cat. This a cat written by Makoto Shinkai, which means he is actually just a guy.
The main woman ends her friendship with another woman because she was interested in the man that the main character isn't even sure she is dating and then she breaks up with said man so this mini drama was very unecessary.

As I mentioned before, this was the worst one and I can't shake the feeling it was the one Shinkai had the most input because it is the main story since it gets the major resolution by the end of the book.

The second story is better (not hard to do), but it also has some issues. It is about a young artist that believes she is the best at art and gains some humility and about the female cat that is in love with the male cat of the first story. I don't like any of these first characters. So, the woman of the first story confides in this girl that she would like to have her confidence and the girl asks out of the blue if it is because of men. They were talking about art! Yet, the woman answers that yes, she would like to have her confidence because her world revolves around men. Then, a random woman that the girl ends up working with warns her about the boss being interested in young girls and she dismisses this as "feminine rivalry". At least, she is proven wrong again and the boss does try to have sex with her. She kicks him out of the house and all her neighbors clap (just like in that one tumblr post). The handling of the situation was ridiculous. The female cat is desperate to have sex so she hooks up with a random street cat and gets pregnant because the cat she actually likes doesn't want anything with her.

There is also the mention at the end that the artist girl must pursue art in university or she wouldn't even have a chance to make it in that area. I don't know if in Japan that is different, but there are a lot of artists making a living out of their art that never went to university. So, I am not sure about this lesson that the story is trying to pass as wise.

The third story was the best. It is about a woman that gets sick and can't leave her house because her friend dies soon after they had an argument. The main young woman blames herself for this and her mother gets her a small cat called Cookie in hopes that it would help her. This story was cute, but could have been executed better. It also felt shorter than the other stories. Of course, it also had the young female cat mentioning that her mother (main female cat of the former story) told her that when they cry a lot they get lines under their eyes and that is ugly. I can't have nice things in this book. First of all, you're a cat. It's this kind of dumb stuff that brings the book down. Then we also have this same young female cat thinking that she would like a cat like the male one from the first story for a husband. Because of course female characters have to think about male characters, especially when their personality give us nothing.

The fourth and last story is alright. I like the friendship between the old fat cat and the old dog and I like how this independent cat came to care for an older woman that spent a big part of her life caring for someone that was sick and couldn't take care of himself. What I really didn't care for is that a male character from her family was introduced just so he could end up with the single woman from the first story, but whatever. I expected that to happen anyway.

I believe that fans of Shinkai's usual works will enjoy this book because they don't seem to have the same issues I usually have with his movies, but this is also not heavily romantic so keep that in mind.

This definitely made me think twice about buying another book just because there is a cat in it. It wasn't good, but given the first story it could have been so much worse.