I bought The Cat Who Saved Books as part of my Japanese Book Haul some time ago. Cats and books are among my weaknesses (and good yarn), so I couldn’t resist the gorgeous cover art and the premise of the tale.
Sosuke Natsukawa’s novel tells the story of Rintaro Natsuki, a quiet and introverted high school student who gets sucked into a journey with a cat named Tiger to save books in peril.
It reminds me a bit of Bruce Lee’s unfinished Game of Death, in which his character has to encounter levels of opponents to complete his objective. This this story’s case, it is levels of book abusers! Our novel, however, is a tad more lighthearted and with a lot less blood.
Without spoiling the story, however, The Cat Who Saved Books is a heartwarming read with many allusions to how books are often treated today: mass produced content or fodder for Artificial Intelligence training data. This book feels like a critique and a metaphor for the industrial hydraulic cutters and high-speed sheet-feeders AI companies use to train their learning language models.
Other times, the book is a metaphor for people that treat books solely as containers of information. People today are impatient to “get to the point” and neglectful of reflecting on the words read. Too Long Didn’t Read is a sentiment shared among many who see a wall of text and their instinct is to stop reading—so, they opt for summaries instead.
This book reignited my love for reading at a time when I began reading less. Even though I personally enjoy reading, it is still a practice that requires one to train their attention span in a post-modern world of distractions and addictions.
This is definitely a short and kind read for those passionate about the written word and keeping it alive.
