I've been enjoying a lot of fiction in translation from Japanese lately and so approached this with excitement and trepidation. Could Bradley manage to capture that elusive Japanese feel? For me he mostly did and I enjoyed exploring many areas of Tokyo through the cast of characters. Possibly at times the book goes a little further and a little darker than I expected but it was still a clever book and a great story.

I absolutely loved this book and can't believe it's a debut. There are lots of intertwining stories that are connected in clever – sometimes subtle, sometimes clearer – ways that go beyond the cat. I found myself completely immersed in each and every story, despite their short length, but the disappointment of moving on to another story was short-lived as I was immediately drawn into the next. There wasn't one weak story, which can be rare for this type of book!

The interlinking is a brilliant way of demonstrating how in our busy lives, particularly city life, we only see snippets of a stranger's daily life, when they have a whole world beyond this tiny interaction or passing. This can apply to any city, and I completely understand that feeling. And on the other hand, the Tokyo lifestyle and Japanese culture is completely unknown to me, so I loved the insight into this different world that I sometimes couldn't relate to. This was supported by the inclusion of characters from elsewhere – the American translator, and the American husband for example – who are also navigating the city/the culture as an outsider with you. But beyond the obvious outsiders/westerners, even the Japanese characters are outsiders in their own ways, maybe othered by their inability to (or choice not to) conform to Japanese norms, or by society's prejudice against them. Beyond the direct crossovers in the stories, there are so many deeper connections between them, leaving so much to think about and discuss.

This is the kind of book that stays with you long after you've finished reading it. I will definitely be seeking a physical copy of this book when it's published, as it's certainly one for the bookshelf (when it's not being passed around for everyone to read!).

I found this a wonderfully mesmerising and innovative look at perhaps the less well known areas and streets of the giant metropolis that is Tokyo. Although written by ostensibly an outsider, Nick Bradley takes the reader on an insightful journey of understanding and exploration where they can visualise and hear the sights and sounds of the City. In a series of seemingly disparate but actually interconnecting short stories, we see how the wanderings and journey of a stray cat forms the connecting points.

Tokyo in the run up to the 2020 Olympics, is a city of change, determined to present its best face even if that means pushing people and indeed the aforementioned cat further to the margins. All the short stories though ultimately connected are also standalone reads and written in varying styles including manga. Its one of those books where you just sit back and let the author take you on a ride both physically and metaphysically. A book of time and place, it reminded me strangely of a recent rereading of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz with its evocation of a changing city and its less glimpsed citizens. Strongly recommended.

A wonderfully clever and captivating read! Each story seems to be bursting with life and the city acts as the perfect interlocking backdrop for the way Bradley has woven each story together.

Start of the book was great, I really enjoyed first story. It did leave me confused, however I did expect an explanation later on in the novel. I did like how stories intertwined and everyone was connected to each other in a way. However there were more negatives for me later in the novel. I started losing track of all the names and people and I believe I wouldn't be the only one as it is not that easy to remember that amount of foreign names, stories became less interesting mostly. I did like how a comic book was introduced among stories (yes, it's manga, but it didn't have this manga character IMHO). But the biggest disappointment to me was that these stories lacked Japanese feel to them. I love Japanese culture and literature, but it wasn't there. Even to the point that all the conversations did sound very western to me. Sadly it didn't live up to expectations...

What to say about 'The Cat and the City'? Any book that opens on a sleezy tattoist maturating in their open shop can only go two ways...
Within pages I was hooked. I haven't read a book this spellbinding in a long time. Though the cat touches the lives of each person in the story, this is a book truely about people. People living their lives in the madness that is Tokyo. The Olympics loom and are the homeless being removed from the streets? Does everyone feel so alone in Tokyo? Will a robot change the life of a little girl.
It's a book of the city, of Japanese culture, of myth and legend. Of a little calico cat.
Each chapter is different yet each person's life is beautifully entwinned with the others. A different person with a different life, yet still so entwinned.
Inbetween reads, I couldn't stop thinking about the book and where it would take it's characters next. It's reminded me just how much I love Japan and it's culture.
I loved it. So much more than what I thought it'd be. I'd fully recommend it, indeed I already have!

I recieved this book for free from NetGallery in return for my honest review.

This is a first novel and it captivated me so much that once I’d finished it, I just wanted to read it all again! Vivid, stunning and unexpected – Bradley brings Tokyo to life, with characters full of hopes, dreams, disappointments and superstitions and every one of them has a cat in their lives. At first it feels like a collection of short stories, but soon, the characters start to connect, and it’s truly magical. I learnt about the ancient art of tebori tattooing, calligraphy, computer games, okonamiyake, car production, cat cloning, taxi driving, disappearing cats, manga, the yakuza gangs, karaoke and much, much more. Can’t wait to read more by this author!

YES! My passion for Japanese literature drew me to this book but I have to admit that I was sceptical when I realise that it wasn’t a Japanese author. I was very pleasantly surprised by the “Japanism” in his writing (although you can feel the western in him throughout the book) this is a very clever and insightful first novel that will make you escape to the fascinating culture of beautiful Japan.

This is a series of interconnected short stories, each one explore aspects of human nature and relationship with a great criticism on modern society in Japan. From the story of a homeless man living in an abandoned capsule hotel with the weight of his dark past on the shoulder to the story of a young woman looking forward to omatsuri (town festival) to spend time with her “lover” that gets her little world shattered by a sight while walking through a temple at night to a story told by a brilliant manga strip. Finding the subtle links that makes them all connected is another great addition.

Through out the book you can feel the love and passion for Japan from the author, he gives us amazing insights to Japanese ways without having to describe or say with words, you can just feel the greatness, loneliness and darkness of what I find, such a fascinating culture. His evocation of Tokyo and Japanese language is smart and knowledgeable. There is some twisted moments in some stories reminding me of Ryu Murakami’s writing and I love it.

I recommend this novel, it’s a great first novel. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me read an advance copy.

Thank you to NetGalley for letting me read this book. It's a series of interconnected stories, linked by the calico cat of the title. It's set in Tokyo, city of cherry blossom and soap brothels. There are dark edges to these stories, and a whiff of the supernatural at times. There's all life here, from office ladies to yakuza, bullied children to tattoo artists.

I enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed recognising people I'd already met from meeting them in new places, seeing them from different angles. I enjoyed the build up of details and events. I enjoyed the foray into graphic novel, the sci-fi short story, the mystery of the green-eyed girl. I enjoyed the feel of the book, the sense of Tokyo as a character in its own right. I've seen that done with London many times, it was good to experience it with something so foreign. Well worth a read.

For those reading on a Kindle there are several pages of cartoons towards the end of the book, you need very good eye sight. Fortunately I was able to download and open with ADE to be able to read those on my PC. They are integral to the story and I had to go back and read them, which was slightly annoying.

The Japanese seem very fond of their cats, they seem to have almost god like status, I don't disapprove!

What seems like a collection of short stories is more than that. They are connected, not only by the Calico cat but that the characters are connected, some more so than others.

I liked the insight into Japanese life, the formality and rules, even when you are angry with someone and even when it is your parents. There was some very small snippets of how the Chinese characters are formed to make other words, it was interesting and not overdone and gave an idea of how difficult the language is.

The book also touched on the cleaning of the streets of the undesirables., not the first time a city has done this when a big sporting event is about to happen. Tokyo is no different to anywhere else having thousands of homeless on the streets.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for my ARC in return for an honest review.

The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley was a charming read with many inter-linking stories and characters living in and around Tokyo. I loved the different character voices and the way all the stories overlapped and formed a satisfying whole. There were lots of humans, some cats and even a robot which made terrible puns.

I'm a great fan of David Mitchell and this novel had echoes for me of some of his earlier work, like number9dream. It's a little bit magical, a little bit whimsical and very Japanese (to someone who's never been but has watched lots of Studio Ghibli films).

A well-deserved five lucky Maneki-neko cats out of five from me!

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

The book is a series of linked short stories of a series of characters in a 2019-2020 Tokyo, preparing for the Olympics (not least with an attempt to clean up the City streets of undesirables) – the characters linked not just by a mysterious and magical stray cat which features in all the stories but by a web of connections both strong (relatives, close friends, colleagues) but also fleeing (shared glances, taxi-ride interactions, overheard conversations, street encounters).

Around a third of the way through the book – and despite my enjoyment of it, my enthusiasm was starting to wane. The links seemed a little too superficial/gratuitous and further the vivid portrait that the book paints of Tokyo and Japanese culture, began to feel a little too vivid and recognisable.

Every remarkable (to a Westerner) feature of that City and culture is, in fact, remarked upon. And most of the remarks are by natives. At times it felt like the equivalent a book written by a Japanese person about Londoners who spend most of their time thinking about “mind the gap”, bendy-buses, Black cabs, Boris-bikes, after-work pub trips, Tesco Express, Greggs, curries etc, rather than those things forming an accepted and familiar scene which stays in the background.

I felt the book was in danger of being The Cliché and The City.

Just at that point, a rather sordid tale (which turns the book into Sex and The City) formed a break and after that the book I felt that the book emerged into its true strength – the writing style began to broaden out with some different sections including a manga strip, but in particular a translated short story and a detective case notes which not only added further links, but served to bring all of the stories together.

A highly entertaining debut novel, ideal for fans of early David Mitchell (especially those who would perhaps prefer he stick not just to Japan but to the modern day) and Murakami (especially those who would prefer that he had more in the way of a coherent and relatable macro-plot to his later books).

A lot of the fun to be had reading this book is in spotting the connections between the characters and the stories. And it has to be said, doing that is a LOT of fun.

In the first story, Naomi arrives at at a tattoo parlour and asks for an unusual tattoo, a detailed map of Tokyo all over her back. Kentaro, the tattooist, includes a cat and, much to his surprise, discovers that tattooed cat seems to have a life of its own as it moves around the tattoo he is working on, appearing in a different place each time Naomi arrives for her next session.

This introduction triggers a series of stories, all of which feature a cat in one way or another. To begin with, it feels like a short story collection. But, by about halfway through, it starts to feel more like a novel because so many characters are connected and re-appear in different stories. Some are related to others, some employed by others, some friends with others, some a combination of these relationships and more. It falls to the reader to spot the connections and, as you do that, several different plot lines gradually come into focus. Since spotting these is a large part of the enjoyment in the book, I am not going to discuss any of them here!

I finished the book definitely feeling more that I had read a novel than that I had read a short story collection. Yes, the pieces are often loosely connected. Yes, the timeline as presented is jumbled up. I’d like to re-read the book and “mind map” the connections because what we end up with is a group of people living different lives in one of the world’s busiest cities, but with all of their lives overlapping and crossing one another. It put me in mind of the movie Magnolia which tracks several different people living in a city who are connected in all kinds of ways, most of which they are unaware of (I think - it’s a long time since I watched that film).

And I think that’s part of the pleasure of reading the book, these connections, both known and unknown (sometimes as fleeting as two people sitting on a bus or train at the same time and catching one another’s eye), but connections in the hustle and bustle of a mega-city.

There is a lot of talk of the upcoming 2020 Olympics and the preparations being made across the city (I am not an expert on Japan, but I imagine this is where the “slyly political” blurb comment comes from, at least in part, as the city goes about “clearing up” by taking people off the streets). There are several mentions of people doing their best not to stand out (because the nail that stands out gets hammered). There is a portrait of Tokyo which feels very atmospheric, although I have never been there so I have no way to know if it is accurate.

For the first third of the book, I found myself slightly distracted by the number of Japanese terms that I didn’t understand. Most of them I could work out from the context, although I still felt compelled to Google them to check I had understood correctly. If you want to avoid as much internet searching as I did, my advice would be “things mean what you think they mean, so run with that”. This will make your experience of the book smoother and, probably, better.

That said, I really enjoyed reading this. I am not quite sure where the “formally inventive” description comes from. There are some unusual sections (e.g. a manga cartoon and some social media posts), but this didn’t feel especially inventive to me. And there is one story that feels like it is running separately from the others but ends up pulling several storylines together. Again, this is interesting, but is it “inventive”?

Whether it is inventive or not, it is a lot of fun and worth reading for that and its evocation of Tokyo that feels, to someone completely ignorant, authentic.

Murakami-esque and whimsical; Bradley's short story collection, in which characters reappear and plotlines come together thematically, is an ode to both Japan and cats.

"Sometimes I feel like this whole city is this one vast organism. It's like a human being that we're all part of. But we're restricted by the roads, by the waterways, by the tunnels, the trains. It's like our paths are all laid out for us, and there's no way of deviating from them. That's what makes that cat different from us. It can jump on and off trains randomly. But we humans are bound up in the fate of the city. No one can escape its clutches. I'd love to pack up and leave for the countryside, but I can't get away. I'm stuck here. Kindergarten, Elementary school, Junior High, High School, University, Internship, Internship to Job, Job to Retirement, Retirement to Death. That's my life, already laid out before me. Me, and all those other millions of people I brush up against every day. The city needs us, and we need the city. Symbiotic fuck tonnage."

"Unless he opened his eyes, he would be stuck like this. Looping round and round, zooming in on the city forever, trapped. But he kept them shut. For when he opened them, he would see that there was no longer space for him to sign his name in the roof of his parlour. It would be filled with a real red roof. He’d be faced with a city, with the millions and millions of people moving in and around, through subway stations and buildings, parks and highways, living their lives. The city pumped their shit around in pipes, it transported their bodies around in metal containers, and it held their secrets, their hopes, their dreams. And he’d no longer be sitting on the other side watching through a screen. He’d be part of it too. He’d be one of those people.

With his eyes still shut, he reached under the table, hand scrambling desperately for the knife. He trembled as he opened his eyes. The muscles in Naomi’s back flexed and came to life. And so too, did the city."

The Cat and The City's epigraph is the 1923 poem 青猫 (Blue Cat) by Hagiwara Sakutaro, presented both in the original and in translation:

To be in love with this city is a good thing
To love the city’s buildings, a good thing
And all those kind women
All those noble lives
Passing through these busy streets
Lined with cherry trees on either side
From whose branches countless sparrows chirp.
Ah! The only thing that can sleep in this vast city night
Is the shadow of a single blue cat
The shadow of a cat that tells the sad history of humanity
The blue shade of happiness I long for.
Forever I chase any shadow,
I thought I wanted Tokyo even on a snowy day
But look there – that cold ragged beggar in the alleyway
Leaning against a wall – what dream is he dreaming?

Cats, of course feature heavily in Japanese literature, and the author's thesis is on the same subject, focusing particularly on Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Murakami Haruki.

The novel begins with a tattooist, one of the last to practice the traditional arts, receiving an unusual commission: first his customer, Naomi, is a young woman rather than his usual yakuza clientele, and second her desired design is his most complex yet, a detailed recreation of Tokyo. She wants the city to be uninhabitated, but he inserts a small cat outside Shibuya station, alongside the statue of Hachiko. But when she returns for each future session, he finds, to his astonishment, that the cat has moved to different places in the cityscape.

The tale that follows is a series of what at first seem separate short stories, but one where the character reoccur and the plotlines converge. And linking them all together is a cat that reappears in each scene, but this is no ordinary cat. As an American translator learns from her Japanese teacher:

"貓 P.S. I have a new Chinese character for you to learn. Do you know this one?

Flo looked at the character and thought about it for a second. She was pretty sure it was neko –cat –but had to check. She pulled out her well-thumbed kanji dictionary from a shelf of books on her desk and flipped through the pages. Yes, there it was, neko –cat. But it was different to how it was written normally. The normal way to write the character was 猫–with this radical 犭on the left. The character Ogawa had sent had 豸on the left. That was the tanuki radical. This must be an older version, relating the cat to other shapeshifting animals like the badger, fox and tanuki."

The publisher's blurb describes the novel as "formally inventive and slyly political".

The inventiveness in narration includes a chapter told as a manga cartoon, another as a translated Japanese short-story (actually one invented for the novel) with footnotes, social media posts and the case notes of a detective, which at first appears detached from the other stories but serves to pull the threads together.

Although I perhaps felt this aspect of the novel could have been developed a little further.

The "slyly political" side of the novel includes anti-Zainichi prejudice and the clean-up campaign against the homeless associated with the 2020 Olympics, although Tokyo Ueno Station is a more powerful exploration of this theme.

But the strength to me of The Cat and the City is its evocation of Tokyo, perhaps the best I have read, as someone who has historically spent a lot of time in the city, for example this from Ueno Park in April immediately takes me back to the same sights 20 years earlier:

"The revellers are out in full today. They sit beneath the blossoms, drinking beers, eating bento, passing around plastic containers of fried chicken from the convenience store. Some of the older men are drunk already –fallen asleep on the blue tarpaulins spread across the ground. Everyone’s lined their shoes up neatly by the tarps. Hundreds and hundreds of shoes –mostly the black shoes of salarymen, but there are sandals, high heels and sneakers too. I wonder how many people lose shoes in the hanami chaos."

Indeed one could almost play Tokyo bingo, as Bradley incorporates many aspects of living, working and playing, in the city in to his narrative. Amongst others (many of which I have experienced, but I should say not all, particularly the most salacious)

Roppongi hostess bars
Yakitori
Love hotels
Yakuza, complete with tattoos and incomplete with missing fingertips
Shibuya and Shinjuku night life
Driver-operated passenger doors on taxis
Ramen
Long commutes to the satellite towns
Haiku
Soaplands
Shogi Chess
Daikon radishes
Sensō-ji temple in Asakusa
Homeless people collecting aluminium cans for the recycling fee
Compulsory after-work collegiate Karaoke parties
Onsen
Harajuku shopping malls
Genkan at the entrance to an apartment
Manga
Hello Kitty
Sumo Wrestlers
Kawaii
The Golden Pavilion in Kyoto
Chikan pests on packed trains
Rakugo story tellers
Takeshima Island (or, rather, Dok-do!)
Tokyo tower
Udon
The long trip from Narita airport
Kanji
Hachiko the Dog
Video games
Lawson convenience stores
Capsule hotels
Katakana
Views of Mount Fuji on a clear winter day
Cherry blossom parties in Ueno Park
The JR Yamanote line
School boys in suits and girls in sailor suits
Preprepared peanut butter sandwiches on crustless white bread
Shochu
Gaijin
Onokomiyaki
Onigiri
Shinjuku Station
Coffee in cans
Vending machines

Overall an enjoyable and atmospheric read.

4 star