A book about a cat and books – what could be better?

It was The Other Half who, late last week, pointed me toward the Waterstones website for The Cat Who Saved Books, a slender novel (224 pages) by Sosuke Natsukawa, a hospital doctor and writer in largely rural Nagano, Japan.

And since it involves a cat – and books – well, it was instantly ordered and arrived, very speedily yesterday morning, allowing a sense of perfect timing to offer a weekend of relief from the doom-scrolling.

 

Expertly translated by Louise Heal Kawai, the book tells the story of Rintaro Natsuki. After being orphaned when a very young child, he was taken in and looked after by his beloved grandfather, who ran a small, second-hand bookshop, Natsuki Books.

 

The novel opens with the teenage Rintaro at the funeral of his grandfather, who’s sudden (but apparently peaceful) death has left him in a void. A perfectly pleasant, but previously unknown aunt is going to give him a new home – away from this one – but he is having difficulty trying to sort out the emotions involved in all this.

 

To add to the complexity, the book-loving Rintaro is what the Japanese call hikikiomori – effectively, someone (largely male, but not exclusively) who has withdrawn from society and social engagement.

 

But shortly after the funeral, as Rintaro sits alone between all the books in the shop that is his grandfather’s legacy to him, an orange and yellow striped tabby appears in the shop and speaks to him.

 

The cat introduces itself as Tiger and explains that it (there is no pronoun for the character in the original Japanese) has come in order to recruit Rintaro to help him on a vital mission to save books.

 

And so they set off on their first adventure.

 

Japanese fiction involving cats is pretty much a genre in its own right – including, but not limited to, The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, I am a Cat by Sōseki Natsume, If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

 

These and others are on my own shelves – enough as to help me recognise the tone here.

 

This particular novel is Japanese magic realism – that’s a global concept, not just a Latin American one – and it is fascinating one.

 

On one level, it seems to have a naivety and, as countless reviewers have suggested, ‘charm’, that one could dismiss it quite easily. But it has some profoundly moving moments, together with an underlying quality that is faintly disturbing, in a way that you sense will live with you for some time.

 

And while the morality of Natsukawa’s tale is essentially simply, in other more philosophical ways, it is not.

 

It has a rather formal Japanese style, but is also deeply felt, though never mawkish.

 

I heartily recommend.

 

 

C+nto – a stunning poetic riff on being a butch dyke

It was arguably a fortuitous coincidence that saw me pick up a copy of C+nto.

Having read a review of Joelle Taylor’s 2021 collection of poems in the Observer in mid-February, just after it had just won the TS Elliot award, less than a week later, I was on Broadway Market in Hackney – my local shopping street for over 30 years, in case you imagine I’m part of the more recent trendification – and, after getting incredibly tense about the lack of mask-wearing in shops, happened to walk past the Broadway Bookshop.

Glancing inside the wedged-open door (good ventilation), I could see that the owner was masked, behind a screen. I felt so absurdly grateful that someone was still taking COVID seriously that I went in, heading straight to the poetry shelves, which are not much more than a metre from the door.

And there was C+nto. So, what else to do but buy a copy? And since February is, in the UK, LGBT+ History Month, it also seemed apt.

It is a simply outstanding collection.

“There is no part of a butch lesbian that is welcome in this world”, says Taylor (pictured above) in her introduction.

“According to the Human Dignity Trust, it is illegal to be a lesbian in almost a quarter of the world’s countries.”

She goes on to cite how Brexit has led to a “nationalist confidence”, with “bigots from both sides emboldened to assault homosexual and trans people.

“The word ‘lesbian’ is synonymous with that hated epithet, ‘TERF’, and, as a community, we spend more time policing each other than protecting.”

Quite. And indeed, I am writing this a few days after reports in the LGBT+ press – and even appearing in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun – that the Russian forces currently waging war on Ukraine have drawn up lists of those to be murdered, and that those lists include known LGBT+ people. For the ‘crime’ of being LGBT+.

Vladimir Putin has form on this – not least in terms of Chechnya, which tells us that his support for genocide against LGBT+ people is not imaginary.

However, in terms of the book itself, let’s start with the title.

“Cunto

– inflection of CUNTARE

(third person singular past historic)

“Cuntare

– (transative) (obselete. literary)

To relate, tell, or recount (a story)”

This is an incredibly powerful selection of verse that centres around conveying a sense of a specifically butch lesbian history; of pubs and clubs now gone; of individual dykes now departed.

Taylor very powerfully explores the idea of having to work out not simply who you are, but how you authentically present to a world that does not, largely, want an authentic you – unless you conform to a hetero normative – and in a horrifying large number of cases, will murder you for daring to present as anything other than that.

And indeed, this also touches on what the very process of having to do all this actually does to the person having to do it.

Her idea of a symbiosis between one’s skin and suits of clothing is stunningly effective. As are her portraits of specific dykes that she has known: in particular, in Valentine, where she introduces us to a black dyke – or ‘stud’; a black, masculine presenting lesbian, according to the glossary.

But more widely, in her conjuring up a fictional lesbian club, Maryville, and an origin myth for butch dykes, she has given voice to a world that most people will not know exists.

Scene Nine is set in a crematorium, where butches file past the open coffin of one of their own, only for the lead butch mourner to find that her deceased loved one is to take her final journey dressed in a “cerise ballroom dress, as though the coffin were the display case for a doll. Her face is battered with makeup. Her hair is hair, but the boi knows that under the wig, the stud has a clean undercut. Her severed strings are arranged carefully around her. The woman in the coffin looks at the woman standing over her. The woman in the coffin looks like a woman.”

It is a short, but utterly tragic and heart breaking and powerful representation of the brutal and dehumanising nature of homophobia, that is so very much more than the sum of its words.

Taylor – predominantly know as a performance poet (there are videos online and QR codes in the book for a couple of her performances) is from Lancashire and there are definite moments when you think of Jeanette Winterson and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

But this is in terms of overlap of experiences – perhaps not least in both having made comments on fundamentalist Christianity.

In ROUND THREE – the body as trespass, Taylor writes of how “... three Pentecostal pastors   hymning holy Nazi insignia   break into your home [God is an atheist who no longer believes in Himself]   they unscrew the lightbulbs slowly  eyes fixed on the unfinished girl sobbing war   on the corduroy settee & whisper   a prayer for you to leave your family”.

Her use – and relish – of language is simply breath taking and astonishingly effective.

Sex, gender and so forth is complex – and as a bisexual who struggles even now, at the age of 59, to use the word ‘woman’ to describe themselves (it just really doesn’t seem to fit and never has), there was a vast amount in this collection that I could directly relate to – not least in terms of the ideas around one’s skin as a suit, and picking the ‘wrong’ one off the hanger.

And if there has ever been a better collective noun for butch dykes than “an insolence of leather jackets”, then I dare you to find it!

But I cannot recommend this enough. It is an absolutely incredible work and, I would suggest, as essential a piece of literature as one might wish to find.

 

Joelle Taylor

 

Broadway Bookshop