If Cats Disappeared from the World is a short novel by Genki Kawamura that was published on the 25th of October 2012, selling over two million copies in Japan and translated into fourteen different languages.
Reading is a hobby of mine and sometime in September, I read the book If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura.
If I were to be asked how I would rate my experience reading the book, I would struggle to give a straight answer because I still don’t know how I feel about it.
Kawumara’s novel strikes at the heart of human psychology from the perspective of the novel being of a man who has received news that he has an incurable illness and his time on Earth is limited.
Being faced with this news, the unnamed protagonist of this novel is shocked and in a desperate state.
At home, our narrator finds himself faced with his doppelganger who claims to be the devil yet this doppelganger is found to be a humorous character.
The devil tells him that in order to live for one more day, all he will have to do is to make an object disappear from this planet.
The concept of this book, though simple and original, caught my interest because there was a probing question in my head of the lengths this man will take in order to have one more day on the planet.
If I were to talk about one aspect of this book I enjoyed the most, it would be how it made the reader consider the value of life and how far they would be willing to go in order to savour the time we have on this planet.
