CBR 17 BINGO: “I” (for “If”)
Translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland
A young Japanese postman learns he has a terminal illness and has very little time left to live (months? weeks?). Estranged from his father, the postman lives alone with his cat Cabbage and can’t even come up with a decent bucket list to tackle in his remaining time on Earth. He’s feeling sort of pathetic when the devil appears to him with a bad news/good news scenario: If what the devil says is true, the postman has even less time than the doctors think and will, in fact, die tomorrow. The good news is that the devil can extend his life by a day in exchange for one thing disappearing from the world. Even better, this arrangement can go on as long as the postman likes. “Sure,” our hero thinks, “There’s plenty of crap in the world we can do without.” (I’m paraphrasing.) The catch is that the devil gets to pick which item will be erased in exchange for the extra day of life, so there’ll be no wiping out useless stuff like plastic straws and Happy Meal toys (again, this is me editorializing).
If Cats Disappeared from the World touches not so subtly on “things that matter and things that don’t.” The first objects to go in the Devil-Postman arrangement are mobile phones. The postman observes, “In the span of two decades something that we don’t really need has come to dominate our lives and make us believe we can’t live without it. When human beings invented the mobile phone, they also invented the anxiety that comes with not having one on you.” This set up serves as a framework for the postman to think back on his life and revisit his history with family and friends. He thinks about how his mother died and the distance grew between him and his father. He visits a former girlfriend and analyzes what went wrong in their relationship. He snuggles with Cabbage and ponders who he’ll trust to care for him after he (the postman) is dead.
This is a very simple but endearing story about life. I know, I just complained about a novel for being overly saccharine and obvious about life being measured by quality instead of length, so I spent some time thinking about why If Cats Disappeared from the World hit me differently. I can’t deny that the presence of a sweet feline might have had something to do with it (and how adorable is the name Cabbage for a kitty?) but mostly it’s because this book is surprisingly light and funny for a story about a lonely man who is going to die. The postman takes to calling the devil “Aloha” for his habit of appearing in Hawaiian shirts. The devil mocks the postman’s attempt at a bucket list, but it feels more out of concern than cruelty. The author loves movies and books and references works that range from Charlie Chaplin to When Harry Met Sally. The postman’s ultimate realization that “life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish” doesn’t come off as earnest or maudlin. In short, this novel doesn’t take itself too seriously.
One caveat: I don’t know whether it’s the translation or whether I have a skewed expectation of Japanese literature, but the writing was. . . basic. There’s nothing wrong with that, but somehow I expected more Kazuo Ishiguro and less John Scalzi. Being completely incapable of reading the original Japanese, I have no way of knowing whether that’s the style of the author or the style of the translator. I’d love for someone with knowledge in this area to weigh in.