This was an… interesting read. I’ve read a few reviews online since finishing this book, all gushingly positive (as I often am) and with rarely a bad word to say about it. Now I’m not saying that I hated the book or even didn’t like it I just felt it was very… middle of the road, not because it was badly written nor because it had any poor topics but in all honesty it felt slightly like it was a victim of itself. I’ll try and explain, if language allows.
There has in recent years been a large insurgency of Japanese culture into our everyday lives, especially those of us who spend a deal of time on the internet. Globalisation has made the world a beautiful, close place, instant communication and near instant travel has created a great smooshing of cultures and personalities that makes a lot of us able to feel association to places we’ve either never been or never experienced in depth. There’s nothing wrong with this, it brings us closer and makes interaction between us far easier particularly when times get a little tougher. There has however been a rise in a certain fetishisation of some cultures, Japan is one of these.
Japan is about as close to an alien culture that a Western European person (or American) can experience, the differences are vast in societal outlook, cultural standards and likely most importantly for this review, language. It’s no secret that language can dramatically affect the psychology of those who are speaking it. Even at it’s most rudimental I find myself far more aggressive and loud when speaking in Italian than I would in English, happy to cross over and interrupt with dramatic hand signals whoever is speaking, because that’s how you speak the language. Japanese is about as opposite to that as possible as a language (having only ever studied a little I am relying on accounts I have read from bilingual speakers here). It is clinical, direct and has an aversion to overly flowery descriptions and metaphors that Romantic and other Indo-European languages use. Instead Japanese takes its depth from elaborating on points, of creating frameworks of description to present a picture of what the author is putting forward, of breaking down the meaning and creating a full painting of what they are trying to convey. It’s hard to explain in English because that’s not how the English explain things, but there are authors out there who can do it. Murakami is an obvious and repeatedly celebrated example of this, using hugely elaborate frameworks alongside detailed description whilst shirking the overly dramatic language of the usual English novel to create intricate and beautiful works that are both uniquely Japanese and yet cleverly translated (or rewritten as Murakami is himself a fluent English speaker) so as to appeal to the foreign reader.
The issue we have here is that a translation of a more simplistic and delicate work such as ‘What if Cats Disappeared from the World’ will naturally not present the story as the original author had intended. The problem I have with it is that the fetishisation of Japanese culture seems to mean that we forget this, that in reading the book the basic-ness of the story, of the description seems to be lauded whereas I feel that often it means that we are losing out on what could have been further depth and insight. The holding high of the fact that it’s popular in Japan and how ‘quaint’ it seems to be, simplicity that’s celebrated I feel, is actually a result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the divergences in language.
Don’t get me wrong though, this book was hella cute. It had moments that were really very beautiful, his interaction with his ex and the perfect explanation of how love can be lost was truly gorgeous, it described exactly how many of us have felt; lost and slightly confused as a result of occurrences beyond our control. Also the portrayal of a cat that considers the human to be a dithering idiot is almost comically perfect for the internet generation, as well as the interactions with the devil, the Hawaiian shirt wearing antithesis to our rather bland protagonist providing quips and malicious joviality to otherwise rather dull scenes.
In all though I didn’t feel this book lived up to the excitement around it, a pretty story to be sure, presented in a simplistic and cute way but missing something key, missing the underlying layers that would usually be present. It’s important to note that I don’t feel that this is a failing of the author, Kawamura has written a charming novella for his Japanese audience, short and sweet, simplistic without being too pretentious. The hype-train has picked it up though and held it a little higher than perhaps it needed to be and I feel it’s detracted from where it originally stood. To present it in Indo-European style: it was the breeze whipping the tops of the waves, without touching on the deep moving tides beneath and yet has now been held underwater until it’s forgotten how to fly.