Mary S

Readers of Syou Ishida's We'll Prescribe You a Cat first witness a young man trapped in Japan's very real and sometimes brutal office work culture. Soon, when Shuta Kagawa seeks psychological support to overcome his misery, he enters what will seem to Western readers to be a scene from The Twilight Zone. For Shuta and the book's successive characters who seek aid from "The Clinic for the Soul," the clinic is sometimes there, down a narrow alley in a central city neighborhood, and sometimes not. Uniting and intertwining five individual stories are the charming cats who transform their humans' lives. After finishing the book, many Western readers can resolve many seeming ambiguities through an Internet search of Japan's cat culture. Zack Davisson's September 2020 Atlantic article, "Japan's Love-Hate Relationship with Cats" provided me with many an "ah-ha" moment. The book offers glimpses of ordinary life in modern Japan, but beyond that, the magical elements, if researched a bit, open new doors to Japan's long history of cat-related folklore.