REVIEW: Sōseki Nasume's I Am a Cat: The Manga Edition (manga) retold and illustrated by Chiroru Kobato, translated by Zack Davisson

This is a manga adaptation of Sōseki Nasume's I Am a Cat, originally serialized between 1905 and 1906. I bought my copy new.

This review includes spoilers. 

Review:

The whole thing is told from the point-of-view of an unnamed cat, who was found as a kitten and taken in by a teacher named Kushami. The cat observes the various goings on of Kushami's household. There's Meitei, a friend of Kushami's who likes to make things up just to see if Kushami will believe him. There's Mizushima Kangetsu, a former pupil of Kushami's, who has supposedly caught the eye of Kaneda Tomiko, the stuck up daughter of a businessman. Tomiko's mother has a nose so large that Kushami has nicknamed her Lady Nose.

The situation between Kangetsu, Tomiko, and Tomiko's parents is a bit of a mess, with Tomiko's mother only willing to accept Kangetsu as Tomiko's husband if he gets his doctorate. Meanwhile, Kangetsu is cheerfully dragging his feet. There is much joking about Tomiko's mother's large nose (and efforts to convince Kangetsu not to marry Tomiko, since her nose may eventually grow to match), not that Kangetsu seems all that interested in Tomiko in the first place.

I haven't read the original novel. From what I can tell online, it's considered a classic and is a satirical work that pokes fun at the lives of middle-class Japanese people during the Meiji era. 

Unfortunately, Tuttle Publishing just let the work stand on its own, with no additional translator's notes or cultural notes. Just based on what I've read about the original novel on Wikipedia, I think this was a mistake. An additional section contextualizing the work and explaining certain sections would have been helpful.

Taken on its own, it's a manga with passable art (although the cat occasionally has legs short enough that he looked a bit like a Munchkin breed), a mildly ridiculous and also kind of boring story, and a few weirdly tragic moments. While the humans are off joking about noses and talking about marriage, one cat passes away from a sudden illness, and the POV cat gets drunk and drowns to death.

I suppose I like cats too much, and reading this for the cats is a bit like reading, say, Animal Farm for the animals. At any rate, I wasn't left with an urge to try the original book.