We'll Prescribe You A Cat

by Syou Ishida

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 297
Rating:

Synopsis:

A cat a day keeps the doctor away…

Discover the award-winning, bestselling Japanese novel that has become an international sensation in this utterly charming, vibrant celebration of the healing power of cats.

Tucked away in an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can only be found by people who are struggling in their lives and genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take” their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.

Throughout the pages, the power of the human-animal bond is revealed as a disheartened businessman finds unexpected joy in physical labor, a young girl navigates the complexities of elementary school cliques, a middle-aged man struggles to stay relevant at work and home, a hardened bag designer seeks emotional balance, and a geisha finds herself unable to move on from the memory of her lost cat. As the clinic’s patients navigate their inner turmoil and seek resolution, their feline companions lead them toward healing, self-discovery, and newfound hope.

Syou Ishida’s We’ll Prescribe You A Cat seems to me to fit precisely in the middle of current trends for books like Before the Coffee Gets Cold, offering a little magical realism to give people second chances, life realisations and tearjerking reunions. If you’re a huge fan of cats, you might enjoy it extra just for that, because each chapter/short story features a person being, indeed, prescribed a cat for whatever ails them (and of course, the cat works, sometimes in unexpected ways).

Obviously if you take a step back and think about it, this is pretty cruel to the cats — throwing them into situations with humans who often don’t know how to take care of them, or don’t even seem to like cats. Sure, it works out okay and people get won over, and there’s a magical realism explanation as to why the cats might not super mind/might have some say, but this kind of thing doesn’t actually work like that. Which is fine, that’s what this kind of fantasy is for, but the logical and literal-minded might not be able to set that aside.

For me, I just felt that these books are basically fundamentally the same. The mechanism for the reconciliations, realisations, reunions, etc, is different — but the same desire for a magical way to fix things is being met by these stories, whether it’s cats, coffees or childhood meals. I can imagine why they’re popular, both right now and in general, but to me they mostly lack bite and substance.

So this was okay, but left me pretty cold.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)