Author: Sosuke Natsukawa
The Cast Who Saved Books is a short novel blending magical realism, philosophy, and the love of books and cats. The novel follows a high school student, Rintaro, who inherits his grandfather’s bookshop following his grandfather’s death. Rintaro is a withdrawn and shy person, and enjoys reading. When he encounters a talking cat, Tiger, who takes him to various labyrinths to save books, in different ways, he finally opens up not just to the cat, but also to a high school friend who was coming to visit him. These labyrinths initially looked just like magic because Rintaro and the cat walk through otherwise invisible walls and go to different worlds, but there is philosophy and criticism of consumerism underneath this magical storytelling.
Natsukawa skillfully critiques how we collect books without always reading them, and we just keep them locked up in cupboards as a status symbol. Equally, some try to read too much and too fast, without enjoying books, just to gain status by being seen as well-read, without assigning proper meaning to books. This story is then paired with another labyrinth that critiques speed-reading and today’s world’s desire to read quickly, and only focus on reading book summaries. This is presented through a person who is cutting books into short sentences so that people can just read that and get a gist of the book, which means that reading loses meaning and depth.
However, this is also a criticism of the current culture, where people have a low attention span and only look at what they can use in self-presentation and promotion without ascribing meaning to interactions such as reading. Equally, another labyrinth critiques books being reduced to products and only books that sell being published and promoted, thus commercializing literature while pushing less conventional books and authors aside. This part is a perfect critique of how literary agents currently work, e.g., over-saturating the market with bookish books where some are so poorly written that they potentially distract from meaningful books about books that deserve to be written and read. Equally, less conventional books that do not follow trends get ignored.
The novel essentially argues that we should engage in slow, thoughtful reading as a form of respect for both the text and oneself. I do not necessarily think everyone who reads fast engages with books properly. Obviously, reading hundreds of books a month can be unrealistic, and the person has clearly not read them properly, but being a fast reader and able to read several books a month is possible (I do that in some months, depending on the workload).
The Cat Who Saved Book is a reminder that reading is not about consumption, but about a relationship with books and exploring other worlds of ideas.
In Bourdieusian terms, the novel is also about internalized dispositions we acquire through upbringing because Rintaro talks about his love for books, and particularly less-popular classics, a passion he developed through his grandfather. Internalized dispositions, developed in our habitus, shape how people think, what they consider normal or natural, and their tastes, preferences, and behaviors, as we know from Bourdieu’s work. This is what this book is about, as well as criticism of this disposition and habitus not exactly fitting into the current, consumerist, self-obsessed world.
A great book and paradoxically, a quick read
Thank you for reading!