In the wildly popular 2024 Japanese novel “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat,” penned by award-winning Kyoto-born Japanese author Syou Ishida and translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda, you will go on a quick, quirky ride set in Kyoto that is cat-centric, playful and surprisingly relatable.
At the heart of it is the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul, a peculiar place that seemingly appears and disappears at will. It is visible only to those truly in need of some serious healing.
Once you eventually find it, you are greeted by a particularly heavy door and a doctor who seems to laugh at almost everything.
At the end of each visit, the reluctant “patient” is handed a prescription: a cat they are meant to take home for an average dose of 10 days. A paper bag of cat food and personalized instructions on how to deal with the animal are to be picked up on the way out.
None of these new pet guardians feel like their chosen cat would last that long. And they would all be right — by being wrong.
The stories are mischievously stretched across five chapters, each dedicated to a cat: Bee, Margot, Koyuki, Tank and Tangerine, and Mimita.
The number five, which is constantly repeated throughout the book, seems to carry cultural weight in Japan, suggesting balance and harmony, such as with the five senses and the five elements.
“Cats can solve most problems,” says the doctor. Often they create the very same problems they later seemingly solve.
One story follows an overworked man with insomnia; another shows a woman learning to trust herself, a theme common to all the tales. The stories gradually go from simple to the more complex.
Each tale stands alone, yet all explore the same theme: how felines can both wreck and restore a life, often simultaneously, leaving a paw-shaped mark along the way.
The book somehow avoids being too cutesy or kitschy. You will feel like you want to spend all nine lives with these five stories.
After flipping to the final page, you will likely want to linger longer. Not to worry, there is already a sequel, “We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat," which I will definitely crawl into next.
Volume three in the series has also already been released in Japan and will be published in English soon as “Welcome to the Kokoro Cat Clinic.”
