



The Blanket Cats
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
"Utterly charming . . . I would read a hundred of these stories" Shelby Van Pelt, bestselling author of Remarkably Bright Creatures
Is three days with a cat enough to change your life?
The troubled and anxious of Tokyo are desperate to find out. They all have their problems - and they all want to believe that a feline companion from a unique pet shop can help them find a solution. But there are rules: they must be returned after three days, and they must always sleep in their own familiar blankets.
In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven such customers, including a couple struggling with infertility, a middle-aged woman on the run from the police, and two families in very different circumstances simply seeking joy.
But like all their kind, the blanket cats are mysterious creatures with their own unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn't what they really need.
Three days may not be enough to change your life. But it might be enough to change how you see it.
"A breath of fresh air in the genre of healing fiction. Boldly exploring the grey areas and struggles of life . . . it left me feeling hopeful that a small step in the right direction is what it takes to make things better" Shanna Tan, translator of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
"The Blanket Cats is a triumph" Jinwoo Chong, award-winning author of FluxFlux and I Leave It Up to You
"There's more to the mysterious Blanket Cats than meets the eye. Shigematsu's canny felines are adept at bringing clarity to their temporary owners and giving them a subtle nudge in another - often unexpected - direction" Cat Anderson, translator of The Chibineko Kitchen
Translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Japanese author Shigematsu (Knife) offers a touching collection of linked stories about a Tokyo pet store that rents out cats for three-day terms. There are rules to follow: cats are not to be fed food other than the special kind the store supplies, and renters must never wash the cat's blanket—though the penalties for not following these rules remain unclear. In "The Cat Who Sneezed," Norio, 40, who's unable to have children with his partner, Yukie, comes to realize that having a pet is hard, thankless work, after the cat they rented shows no interest in the tower they bought for it. "The Cat Who Knew How to Pretend" follows a woman named Hiromi who rents a cat to stand in for her family's recently deceased pet tabby, a ruse for the benefit of her senile grandmother. Ryuhei, the recently unemployed protagonist of "The Cat Dreams Were Made Of," hopes the cat he rents will keep his children happy as they prepare to move into a smaller home, but the gambit fails miserably. Shigematsu adds depth and intrigue by avoiding sentimentality, so that when a story does contain a happy ending or a moment of comfort for the characters, it feels genuine. Fans of "healing fiction" like Hiro Arikawa's The Travelling Cat Chronicles will find much to enjoy.