We'll Prescribe You a Cat

Image credit: Dymocks

After closing the cover on the Temeraire series, I was certainly done with fantasy for a while but at a loss as to what to read next. At the recommendation of my partner, I had had a book sitting on my bedside table for months, which I was able to finally crack the cover on during a recent holiday trip. A delightfully sweet and wholesome collection of stories that I powered through in two days, we’re talking about We’ll Prescribe You a Cat.

Tucked away in an alley in Kyoto is the Nakagyo Kokoro Clinic for the Soul, a clinic that most patients discover through hearsay that specialises in the healing power of cats. While the patients that find their way there are often puzzled at the clinic’s methods, they can’t argue with the results: a disheartened business man discovers the joy of physical labour, a middle-aged father finds relevance at his job and home, a young girl navigates the complexities of schoolyard cliques, a hardened designer learns the precious balance of work and life, and a geisha manages to finally move on from the memory of her lost cat.

Similar to Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this book is a collection of individual stories that are tied together by a building. In BTCGC it’s the café where you can travel back in time that inspires the heartwarming stories of character growth and here it’s the clinic that works to the moto, ‘cats can solve most problems.’ Humorously, each character ends up bringing home a cat from a consultation, despite not really knowing anything about caring for the creatures, and through this forced period of temporary pet-ownership their worlds are opened and transformed. It’s similar to the manga and anime series My Roommate Is a Cat.

The stories are sweet and relatable and made just a little sensational by the funny and nonchalant narrative treatment of such an abstract clinic concept. Admittedly I have not read a lot of Japanese fiction, but what is appealing to me most from what I have read is the narrative minimalism that flavours the novels. The prose is simple, even blunt, which allows the emotional clout of the story to just wash over the reader in all its lovely wholesomeness. It also makes books such as this very easy to read and devour in no time at all, adding to the delightful reading experience by giving that quick and delicious feeling of achievement when we close the cover.

Image credit: Penguin Random House

We’ll Prescribe You a Cat is the type of book that consistently makes you audibly sigh happily, it’s a cosy little read made up of compelling stories of relatable characters that envelop you right from the first page. It’s funny, fresh, sweet, and sometimes a little melancholy; a delightful and comforting reading experience that makes the day better.

Author: Syou Ishida, 2024

Published: Penguin Books, 2024. Translated from Japanese by E. Madison Shimoda.