Some books hit you out of the blue. Like some shiny coin you spot on the sidewalk, you wonder if it’s worth picking up. You know coins aren’t worth anything these days, but for some reason you pick it up anyway. And—wonder of wonders—it’s solid gold! From 1896! And stamped with some king’s portrait or something crazy. You get the picture. That’s the way I feel about The Cat Who Saved Books.
On its surface it’s a fairly short tale about Rintaro Natsuki, a young wall flower type who has inherited his Grandfather’s book store. Though he loves books, he’s still in high school. There’s no way he can run the shop. So of course he plans to sell it. That’s what any reasonable person would do.
But then he meets a cat who…has other ideas. And by rather improbable and quite fanciful means, he convinces Rintaro that there are even more books that need saving beyond the ones on his Grandfather’s shelves.
A book lover’s book
This is not a book I would normally have thought looked promising from the cover. But the sparse style and distinct voices of the characters drew me in from the start.
This is a book of whimsy. If you’re looking for hardcore realism, you might as well stroll on past, because this story makes no attempt to explain how or why any of what is happening does. I suppose Dickens’ A Christmas Carol might come to mind as something in the same vein as this, but it’s so mystical it almost borders on allegory. Certainly some of the characters are meant to be mere representations of a certain kind of mood or sentiment which exists toward books.
But oh what fun it is to go along for the ride. Because through Rintaro, we get to fall in love with books all over again. We get to rediscover the magic and the wonder and most importantly the value of books in a modern day, digitally obsessed mono-culture.
Short and sweet
The Cat Who Saves Books is an unusually short tale. It’s more dream-like than fantasy, more like an episode of the Twilight Zone than a neat and tidy tale. Yet for those brief pages, it sparkles in the night sky of rare and wonderful books.
There is wisdom here, real widsom, a rare feat in modern books. For in the end, this is not just a book about books and the people who love them, it’s about life and what it means to be human. It’s about connecting with others through and around books and not just living with those stories in a quiet corner in your own head. It’s about the courage to step out and take a risk and then grow because of it.
This book may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you do find yourself in Natsuki’s books one day, my recommendation is to pull up a chair, slide this volume off the shelf, and settle in for a most lovely tale. And keep one eye open for stray cats.
