The Guest Cat Author: Visit Amazon's Takashi Hiraide Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0811221504 | Format: PDF
The Guest Cat Description
Review
“What initially reads like free association turns out to be a near-microscopic record of emotion and phenomena.” (Alan Gilbert - The Believer)
About the Author
Takashi Hiraide was born in Moji, Kitakyushu in 1950. He has published numerous books of poetry as well as several books of genre-bending essays, including one on poetics and baseball. He currently lives in the west suburbs of Tokyo with a cat and his wife, the poet Michiyo Kawano.
- Paperback: 144 pages
- Publisher: New Directions (January 28, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0811221504
- ISBN-13: 978-0811221504
- Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
“The Guest Cat” written by Takashi Hiraide is a nice story about human alienation, a routine that slowly kills what is most precious in our lives - closeness and love for the people closest to us.
In the center of the story is a young couple who live in a rented Tokyo house. Although given their thirties they are not decades together, their life had already turned into a survival from day to day, while they are doing their copy-editing job at home, having little to say to each other.
And then one day in their home will appear an uninvited guest, a small cat who will be coming back again and again each day bringing a sparkle in their boring and repeating daily routine.
Though they themselves will not notice this lovely animal is slowly becoming much more than a likeable pet of which they take care – this small cat will become a new bond between the two of them, a bridge that will reconnect the two human beings that although together are two lonely persons…
Though very short, this interesting story that comes from the literature that is not so known brings a universal story that nowadays can be told anywhere in the world; busy life, routine, everyday care about (annoying) daily obligations, will lead to the situation that slowly everything that connects us with people with whom we live will be put aside – and if we don’t make an effort, a place where we live and spend time will be turned into a place where really we just sleep together.
The cat is here used by author as symbol; instead any other animal or some joint interest that stands out from work could have been used, providing them escape from everyday routine and help them to start noticing each other again.
Literature has perhaps always been driven by tragedy, and there seems to be growing conviction that only spectacular tragedy of high intensity will do. Honesty, we seem to believe, exists only in the stark and the brutal, and as such, death is not sufficient to the truth of the human condition: we must have violent death, suicide, rape, murder, and/or betrayal. Hiraide's novel rejects this premise. While conviction is not a word one hears often in the discussion of literary fiction, (primarily, I think, because of the word's moral connotations), to write a novel in which no one is killed or violated, in which no one deed has catastrophic consequences, and no dramatic event serves as a hook, takes great conviction. To write such a narrative, one must believe that the dignity and drama of everyday human existence warrants novel-length attention, that a reader need not be bribed with titillating violence or perverse desolation, and moreover that paying such attention will be a boon to the reader.
While The Guest Cat shares aesthetic affinities with Shusaku Endo's Deep River and Yukio Mishma's The Sound of Waves, the novel most closely resembles Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years. The Guest Cat is a novel of understated conviction that offers the reader a straightforward story set in a minor key and rendered in precise, simple prose, and the effect is staggering. One feels the depth, intensity, mystery, and urgency of human existence like a pulse in nearly every page and image, and the result of Hiraide's conviction is a novel that invites the reader to rediscover the layers of her/his own existence, to discover how a cat can become something more, something deeply moving that one clings to because s/he must, and because doing so brings her/his life into focus.
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