A striking evocation of the way we meld our lives and hearts with a beloved creature.
Not just another Japanese cat book…
“Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck in the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y neighborhood of Fuchu City in western Tokyo.” Ginny Tapley Takemori, the translator of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, brings us another resonant slice of Japanese literature and culture. First published in 1999, this memoir by the poet and novelist Inaba (1950-2014) has long been a classic in its home country. The kitten’s rescue in the late summer of 1977 turned out to be the beginning of a 20-year relationship—one that outlasted the author’s marriage and several jobs and changes of residence—and became entwined with her development as a writer and her life as a single woman. In prose chapters that usually end with a poem, Inaba chronicles Mii’s routines and behavior, her early life with unfettered outdoor access and plenty of “boyfriends,” and then her later years, when the pair lived in a high-rise and Mii suffered a long decline. The accounts of feline health crises, aging, and excretion are unsparingly detailed, but in fact, it’s Inaba’s unabashed descriptions of the physical intimacy between a human and an animal that make the book unique. “Since my husband had left, Mii and I had become closer than ever. Our intimacy was spun without words and in time formed into an unbreakable bond. We slept in the same bed, entrusting our bodies to each other, snuggling together, and in the morning the first thing we saw was each other.” The translation preserves some unfamiliar Japanese words (tsubo, tokonoma), but they add to the vivid sense of place created by the many geographic names and Inaba’s lucid images of the physical world around her: wooded suburb, asphalt cityscape, rugged seaside.
A striking evocation of the way we meld our lives and hearts with a beloved creature.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780374614782
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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