The Cat Who Saved Books is a number of lectures attempting to impart wisdom, with a thin--very thin--story. A shame thI don't like being lectured at.
The Cat Who Saved Books is a number of lectures attempting to impart wisdom, with a thin--very thin--story. A shame then, that the lectures themselves are somewhat simplistic and often have strawman arguments on both sides. Natsukawa has some very rigid ideas about reading (and morality, to a lesser extent) and no compunctions whatsoever in just shovelling them into his story. He's terribly fixated on Western classics as The Only True Literature (one quick discussion of Osamu Dazai aside) and flatly ignores that they too, or most of them, started as commercial entertainment meant to relax and fascinate, not instruct.
The framing story of a high school student who's lost his bookshop proprietor grandfather and a mysterious talking cat seems a well-trodden beat if you're even slightly familiar with Japanese media. The reactions of characters, their mannerisms, the way the story unfolds are all comforting in their familiarity if you're a watcher of anime. Quite cosy. Only, I think this would make a pretty unsatisfying anime, completely lacking in believable tension and conflict resolution as it is. If you go another route and make it into a slice-of-life, the drily delivered lectures would feel just as stifling. The wisdom is not delivered organically as something you have to get at, perhaps it would even be fair to call it patronising. Little things like Rintaro's status as a weirdo and a hikikomori or the brusqueness of the cat, or Sayo's instantly being charmed by Rintaro's conduct ring hollow, but I put all of this down to the fact that the story is barely a secondary concern. And very short, but instead of exploring their characters there's an endless repetition of their mannerisms and attention drawn to their supposed characteristics, hoping the reader will fill in what's needed (which I did, so alright. but usually you'd need to convince readers). Of course, the things that are supposed to hit hard and give the reader a warm feeling (or dread, or tension, etcetera) just fall flat.
This is not to say Natsukawa doesn't have good points or doesn't make you think, such as a critique of books as merely disposable diversion, but this is in spite of his extreme didacticism, not because of it. What life lessons you glean from books almost always happen in the background while you sit back and enjoy a good read, and it's not a waste of time if you don't become any wiser or learn anything. This is just the kind of attitude that makes young students turn their backs on reading. This kind of instruction-first, find-the-main-theme-and-idea teaching that schools tend to be so stuck on. The fact that I've always liked books is absolutely NO thanks to my literature classes in primary education (college is a whole different story), and they made me actually resent poetry, for a ridiculously long time. All that pastoral, strictly rhymed, artless, mechanical crap aimed to kids that has so little in common with poetry adults read.
Like I said, I don't like being lectured at. Not even the cat could help....more
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