The Cat Who Saved Books(50)

Startled, Rintaro turned and looked around, but of course there was nobody to be seen. He thought he might have caught a glimpse of the back of a tabby cat disappearing over the fence across the street but he couldn’t be certain. The street seemed just the same as it always was.

He stood there for a moment before giving a little smile.

“I’ll do my best,” Rintaro said. He looked up at the sky.

He would go back inside, finish the cleaning, drink a cup of his usual Assam tea, and read a few pages of a book. When it was time, he would shut up the shop, pick up his schoolbag, and head out to school. Going to school might be dull, but he didn’t want to rack up any more absences and make the class rep angry.

Problems remained, and he had yet to completely resolve any of them, but now all he had to do was follow the path he had chosen for himself.

Leaving the latticed door open, he went back into the shop and got out his tea set. He boiled the water in the kettle and poured it into his grandfather’s well-used teapot. He heard laughter from out in the street. It was the local primary school kids passing by on their way to school. The presence of more people signaled the beginning of a new day.

Surrounded by the pleasant aroma of tea, Rintaro carefully opened his book.

A gentle breeze brushed the doorbell, and it gave a cheerful ring.





A Note from the Translator

I had always wanted to translate something in the fantasy genre, and this charming tale about books and reading was instantly fascinating to me. Who doesn’t love a talking cat?

The Cat Who Saved Books contains four labyrinths, both a classical reference to the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur, and a more modern interpretation of the labyrinth as journey of self-discovery. Throughout the novel, Rintaro Natsuki confronts monsters in the form of people who mistreat books, as well as his own demons. Western literature is frequently referenced, but at the same time this book is very Japanese.

Rintaro is a hikikomori, a Japanese term that isn’t easy to translate into English. Literally meaning to pull inward and confine, the term refers to people, often young men, who have consciously decided to shut themselves away from society, rarely venturing outside to school or work. In 2019 the Japanese government estimated their number at over one million. It can only be assumed that this number has increased over the past couple of years with the onset of COVID-19.

The term hikikomori has become more widely recognized in the English-speaking world, making its way into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2010. And so I made the decision, rather than translating it, to retain it in the text along with some details to remind the reader of its meaning.

I also retained some other difficult-to-translate Japanese terms, such as traditional Japanese architectural features. There is, for example, the engawa, a kind of low wooden veranda that runs around the edge of a traditional Japanese house, and the fusuma, a sliding door made from wood and paper.

Impossible to retain, however, is the absence of pronouns in the Japanese language. English requires them for writing and speech to sound natural. Japanese words for “he” or “she” exist but they are rarely used, and never in this novel. We know because it is stated in the text that Rintaro is a boy and Sayo a girl. The cat poses more of a challenge. Never referred to once as “he,” “she,” or “it,” but simply “the cat” or “the tabby,” this character’s gender is indeterminate.

In truth, the clues are there in its language. There tend to be different masculine and feminine styles of speech in Japanese, and in the original language the cat sounds more like a man than a woman. I could have made the decision to use the male pronoun, and turn the tabby cat into a male talking cat, but I admit to exercising a touch of translator’s prerogative. I felt that there was no necessity to add another male character, and that as the original author had not specified a gender, it was reasonable to use a neutral pronoun. Readers will have to make up their own minds.

—Louise Heal Kawai





A Note from the Illustrator

Reading the novel in Japanese reminded me of certain literary classics from my native country. The author’s name, Sosuke Natsukawa, and the protagonist’s name, Rintaro Natsuki, are both very old-fashioned names. They recall Natsume Soseki, who’s best-known book in Japan is I Am a Cat (1906). If this is all a coincidence, it’s a very good one.

My work plays with the Western perception of Japanese art. I sometimes heighten the Japanese influence by carefully mimicking the look of traditional ukiyo-e painting when I illustrate traditional or historical Japanese stories—a style that originated in seventeenth-century Japan, as a way to capture the hedonistic and sensual delights of the urban entertainment districts. Although the writing style of The Cat Who Saved Books was inspired by the old masters of the Japanese literary canon, the book’s premise feels very modern. Thus, I went for a slight ukiyo-e influence (e.g., the clouds pay homage to iconic painter and printmaker Hokusai’s style, whose print Great Wave Off Kanagawa you will likely recognize), but the cover is more representative of my own “East meets West” personal style.

The colors intentionally draw on a traditionally Japanese color palette—for example, I chose a reddish-orange rather than a deep red—and I was also inspired by the aged paper seen in old Japanese scrolls. But the books featured are Western books. Most of the books referenced in this novel are Western stories, so I thought that was fitting.