"Utterly charming . . . I would read a hundred of these stories" Shelby Van Pelt, bestselling author of Remarkably Bright Creatures
Is three days with a cat enough to change your life?
The troubled and anxious of Tokyo are desperate to find out. They all have their problems - and they all want to believe that a feline companion from a unique pet shop can help them find a solution. But there are rules: they must be returned after three days, and they must always sleep in their own familiar blankets.
In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven such customers, including a couple struggling with infertility, a middle-aged woman on the run from the police, and two families in very different circumstances simply seeking joy.
But like all their kind, the blanket cats are mysterious creatures with their own unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn't what they really need.
Three days may not be enough to change your life. But it might be enough to change how you see it.
"A breath of fresh air in the genre of healing fiction. Boldly exploring the grey areas and struggles of life . . . it left me feeling hopeful that a small step in the right direction is what it takes to make things better" Shanna Tan, translator of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
"The Blanket Cats is a triumph" Jinwoo Chong, award-winning author of FluxFlux and I Leave It Up to You
"There's more to the mysterious Blanket Cats than meets the eye. Shigematsu's canny felines are adept at bringing clarity to their temporary owners and giving them a subtle nudge in another - often unexpected - direction" Cat Anderson, translator of The Chibineko Kitchen
Translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood
Genre: Literary Fiction
Is three days with a cat enough to change your life?
The troubled and anxious of Tokyo are desperate to find out. They all have their problems - and they all want to believe that a feline companion from a unique pet shop can help them find a solution. But there are rules: they must be returned after three days, and they must always sleep in their own familiar blankets.
In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven such customers, including a couple struggling with infertility, a middle-aged woman on the run from the police, and two families in very different circumstances simply seeking joy.
But like all their kind, the blanket cats are mysterious creatures with their own unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn't what they really need.
Three days may not be enough to change your life. But it might be enough to change how you see it.
"A breath of fresh air in the genre of healing fiction. Boldly exploring the grey areas and struggles of life . . . it left me feeling hopeful that a small step in the right direction is what it takes to make things better" Shanna Tan, translator of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
"The Blanket Cats is a triumph" Jinwoo Chong, award-winning author of FluxFlux and I Leave It Up to You
"There's more to the mysterious Blanket Cats than meets the eye. Shigematsu's canny felines are adept at bringing clarity to their temporary owners and giving them a subtle nudge in another - often unexpected - direction" Cat Anderson, translator of The Chibineko Kitchen
Translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Moving between tender sentimentality to deft, often cutting insightfulness through a series of artfully arranged vignettes, The Blanket Cats is a triumph. Seven cats go home with seven new owners for a strict period of three days and two nights, upending seven lives rife with complexity and consequence. Resulting from these unexpected, often messy encounters is a profound image: a kind of knowledge about our human need to be needed that one can't fully understand without having owned a pet, whether for three days or for a lifetime." - Jinwoo Chong
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Used availability for Kiyoshi Shigematsu's The Blanket Cats