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 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
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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