If Cats Disappeared from the World
A young postman lives a small, unremarkable life with his cat, Cabbage — until he is diagnosed with a brain tumour and told he has very little time left. That night, a cheerful, Hawaiian-shirted figure who looks exactly like him appears in his apartment and introduces himself as the Devil, with an offer: for each thing the young man agrees to erase from the world forever, he will be granted one more day of life.
He begins with things that seem trivial — telephones, movies, clocks — but each disappearance quietly unstitches a part of his world and his past: the girlfriend he met because of a phone call, the friend he shared films with, the father he has not spoken to in years. As the bargain approaches the things he loves most, including Cabbage, he is forced to weigh what a single extra day is really worth.
Genki Kawamura's international bestseller is a gentle, philosophical fable about mortality, regret, and the ordinary attachments that give a life its meaning. Slim and quietly moving, If Cats Disappeared from the World asks what we would trade away to live a little longer, and what would remain of us if we did.
A cheerful, Hawaiian-shirted double of the narrator who proposes the bargain.
The narrator's cat.
The protagonist's introverted childhood friend since junior high, an encyclopedic film expert who helps him revisit movies before they disappear.
The Japanese audiobook edition won "Audiobook of the Year" at Japan's 6th Audiobook Awards, recognizing it as the standout audiobook of 2015. The novel itself was a finalist for the 2013 Honya Taisho Award (Booksellers' Award), Japan's major bookseller-voted literary prize, where it placed 8th, but it did not win.