Member Review

'A shooting star flashed in the distance and she thought of making a wish, but realised there was nothing left to hope for.' She and her Cat is punctuated with such moments, suspended between total fulfilment and utter desolation. The novel's protagonists are cats, humans, and a dog. Their lives intertwine in a single story seen from different sides. The chapters mark changes in perspective, slowly drawn into alignment.
Without Makoto Shinkai's (新海 誠) unwavering commitment, the whole thing could be mawkish. I mean talking cats and ambiguous relationships, owner, lover, mother, master, pet and confidant—' She touched me with her fingers and I shuddered with the weight of her sadness.'
Shinkai substitutes a conventional narrative arc for a sequence of incidents that amass to give a sense of place and open the emotional life of its characters, refusing to differentiate between people and animals. The novel has the magical simplicity of a story written by a child but with the maturity of hindsight. As one of the characters notes, things that happen today affect us as adults because we didn't process these sorts of experiences properly when we were at school.
If you read this book, you will wonder why the world seems so complicated when honest truths are so simple.