if cats disappeared from the world book review

Just as he is about to die, he is visited by the devil who offers him a chance to extend his lifespan by making one thing “disappear” from the world.

It’s written in first person, and it concerns a thirty year-old mailman who finds out that he has terminal stage cancer. I’m not sure if the translation’s language carries over from the original Japanese since it is technically a “light novel” – even though I have the original on hand, only I can’t read it – but I don’t really have any issues with the language. It carries the type of language you’d expect from your standard YA novel, something that seemed to agitate some reviewers on Goodreads.

The book arrived nearly three weeks after I ordered it, but in that time I’d also ordered my Kindle and so I haven’t really gotten around to reading it until now. And despite the film’s relative unknown in the Philippines, the translation somehow made its way to our shores. Left: Eric Selland’s translation right: original Japanese, bought in Japan.Įric Selland’s translation ( Amazon Fully Booked) wouldn’t come until a year later, in 2019, through Flatiron Books. I would have wanted to get and read the English version, but at the time it just wasn’t available yet. I bought the books (both Kawamura’s and Murakami’s) for sentimental purposes, as a sort of collection. Why Japanese, though? I don’t know a word from the language outside of the few I’d learned in my two weeks in Nagoya and Kyoto two years ago (“sumisasen,” which I used quite a lot, and “ryōshū-sho”, which became an essential especially when on a government-funded trip). Since then I’ve made pretty much everyone I know watch it, and when I visited Japan in July of 2018 I especially made it a point to visit a local book store and buy a copy of it in the original Japanese (along with the two-volume Japanese edition of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood).

I ended up buying the English translation to Genki Kawamura’s If Cats Disappeared From The World, which I’d first learned about after I was introduced to its film adaptation back in 2017 by an ex-girlfriend. I have a few thoughts on that, but I’ll save it for the end. At this point I was getting the feeling we’d be stuck in lockdown for quite a while, so I wanted to test if Fully Booked’s online store would be a viable alternative. Looking at book covers through a screen didn’t quite emulate the experience, especially when half the catalogue was out of stock, but for the meantime it was enough. That’s how much I missed being inside a book store. The day Fully Booked announced that they would be open for deliveries within Metro Manila amid the community quarantine, I was already on their online store browsing for books.

If cats disappeared from the world book review