not be deceived by the lovely cover, This is not a Hallmarkmovie 'fluffy kitty' story, No coziness here.
What we have here is a bit of magicrealism set in today's Tokyoaccent on realism, I loved the book, even though I found some of the featured characters hard to warm up to, The story is presented episodically, with the connections between the characters slowly being revealed, The calico cat wanders through the pages, sometimes an active participant in the action, other times merely an observer,
Most of the storylines reach a satisfactory stopping point by the end of the book a few are left open, for us the imagine what happens next.
I do want to reread this to see how the author put it all together, I think it would have been even better had I been able to read it in one sitting as I kept losing track of whose story I was caught up in and how that character fit in with the others.
I will definitely keep an eye on this author, This short story collection describes the lives of outsiders in Tokyo but works too much with its cliches, I love Japanese literature and I don't know how to feel about this book, Even though I liked few stories Bakaneko and Trophallaxis, I couldn't really connect to the rest, Furthermore, I'm not sure who the target group for this book should be Maybe for people who are into light entertainment dealing with the exotic side of Japan.
It is a mixed bag and the stories range fromtostars,
Additionally, I wonder why a nonJapanese person would try to write Japanese stories which lack some deeper understanding of Japan's culture, I was actually expecting to see some different insight into Eastern culture maybe But there was no new interpretation or outlook, On the cover, the Guardian says "Touching, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking", In fact, the stories were just ok or not good enough, If you are searching for real Japanese stories, please go look for other stories, You could try "Die Katzen von Shinjuku" for instance written by Tetsuya Sukegawa, If you are looking for entertainment with Japanese elements, you may be ok with this, One of my favourite reads this year, While the individual stories were compelling enough on their own, the interconnectedness of the entire work was stunning Bradley nails the thing he was going for with apparent ease.
There's plenty to mull over here double thumbs up, This book is one long bruh moment, There's a few interesting stories and characters the robot cat is a fun one, and the hikikomori story incorporating a small comic is quite sweet, but most of the stories are really seedy and misogynistic with zero sense of selfawareness.
This book has a severe case of writtenbyaman disease and despite depicting a harsh and melancholy Tokyo, it still manages to romanticise it through what feels like a cringy Western lens to me.
The book has a weird obsession with
portraying gross sex stuff and Japanesewomanwhiteman relationships, and one of the stories is literally from the perspective of a guy who loves to drug women.
The author mentions in his acknowledgements that he has a PhD, and I would like to now formally rescind this PhD for crimes against women and literature.
Много симпатична и очарователна книга с прекрасни колоритни и закачливо навързани истории. Впечатлена съм от начина, по който Ник Брадли е уловил японския дух и го е предал с лекота. Авторът е изградил сюреалистична атмосфера, където главния герой всъщност е котка, която обикаля улиците на Токио. Котката държи града под око и посещава различни местенца, свързвайки по магичен начин отделните истории.
Честно казано, очаквах, че книгата ще е приятна, но не предполагах, че ще ми хареса толкова. Разкош
P. S: Единственото, което ме подразни е, че имаше доста думи и изрази на японски написани на български, които не бяха обяснени какво значат. Като например " Яппари гайджин вакаранай не" стр. Иди разбери що е туй Дори в Google translate не мога да го потърся, понеже е изписано така The Cat and the City is a book in which British author Nick Bradley collects his impressions of Japan, where he reportedly spent about a decade of his life.
It is a collection of short stories that are, through the binding elements of a wandering cat and life in Tokyo, sometimes loosely sometimes closely connected to each other.
I don't know too much about Japan, I have never been there and my general knowledge does not go beyond a diffuse hodgepodge of bits of information I have from Jonathan Ross' Japanorama, the occasional Japanese books I read and movies I watch.
So I'm not sure if “loosely connected short stories” genre is typical Japanese, but I quite enjoyed it here a side character in one of the stories will be the lead in another and someone mentioned somewhere incidentally will play a bigger part in the next story.
I like that kind of connection and it kept me guessing who is who, I also liked the descriptions of a big city here, I sometimes felt like wandering around the city myself and peeping on other people's lives.
Despite this little amusement I have to say that I found most characters very surface level and without depth, I'm not sure if that was the aim here or not but I wished that I had a better link to them, Sometimes some characters felt stereotypical, but as I said, I'm not an expert and can't really differentiate what is intentional here and what is not.
All in all, I enjoyed it as a light entertainment ad learned a thing or two about Tokyo, Me, I am a nobody, And this is my own personal reaction, your mileage may vary,
I like cats, and I am fascinated by eastern cultures and their radically different to western approaches to understanding life and the world we live in.
But I need to read blurbs more carefully, "Inventive", "A love letter to Japan", I diligently read the Guardian review before I bought the book, and it seemed to promise depth, but really was a warning about not much more here than the obvious people affect each other without knowing it or the consequences.
It even said:
"Flo, the translator, sees herself as a “Japanologist” rather than a “Japanophile”, she says, and it seems that Bradley feels the same way.
His author biography reveals that he speaks fluent Japanese and has a PhD focusing on the figure of the cat in the countrys literature, For any readers who want to know more about Japan, calico cats, loneliness or the interconnectedness of fractured lives, this intriguing debut is an excellent place to start.
"sitelink theguardian. com/books/ quot
So I was really looking forward to it,
But the book repeatedly pissed me off, The author, Nick Bradley, according to his own website, was born in Germany and grew up in Bath, England, He has a Masters degree in English literature, An Englishman through and through, He spent all of a decade in Japan, I've spent overyears in Germany as an American expat, married to a German, parent to kids growing up in Germany, and to this day there are things I know I don't understand or appreciate in the depth a German native does.
He has not written a book, however, that dwells deeply on what he might be thought to know deeply about maybe a foreigner's experience in a deeply nationalistic country, or what he sees as the underlying differences in culture and history or even literatures.
Instead, he gives us a very shallow view of Japan as imagined perhaps by what seems to me could be a casual tourist or reader of western magazines about Japan, but through supposedly Japanese characters.
Government cleanups of hobo settlements to clear for the Olympics and the associated human costs in, oh shock, prisons for hobos, and gee whiz, families that reject problematic members as if that weren't a universal phenomenon.
Yakusa tattoo parlors with magical tattoos and a magical halfreal life, half moving tattoo image cat, A hikikomori "saved" by a child's intrusion into his closeted life due to said cat, And on and on. Tourist snapshots by western ad agencies,
Worse, he repeatedly puts side comments into Japanese mouths that are very flattering specifically to Englishmen! How simple can you be as a novelist How condescending can you be to your imagined audience
Maybe with the variety of short stories within an overall framework and manifold interconnections, he is trying to imitate a particular Japanese literary form.
I don't know. He did not seem to be exploring any other overall theme than, gee Tokyo is a big city with a lot of different exotic types in it!! Golly gee! "Interconnectedness of fractured lives" turns out to mean a bunch of broken people meet each other and do things western readers find appropriate save each other, forgive each other, you get the idea.
The content came across to me very much as western ideas in pretty Japanese oilpaper dressing pure kitsch, Nothing like David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet" or Ruth Ozeki's "For the Time Being", each of which is rightly literature, and in its own way are western confrontations with the other that is Japan.
But gee. If you are looking for pretty, slightly "exotic" entertainment in the old, entitled colonialist manner, maybe its a fine book, .