Mind you, though, there is no pitchfork, red face nor horns, but a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and Ray-Bans, laced with a remarkably life-changing offer: the man can earn an extra day of life in exchange for something disappearing from the world. But as if a diagnosis of imminent death were not enough for a day’s events, the Devil makes an appearance into the man’s bottomless hopelessness. Only thirty years old, with a job in a post office, a cat called Cabbage for company and without any greater aspirations, the young man is perfectly content with his life until a persistent flu turns out to be a terminal brain tumour. Who doesn’t deal with the devil every now and again? Or perhaps a god from your chosen religion, for the more saintly among us? Or just any form of non-supernatural, psychological trading in the privacy of your own mind? At risk of branding myself as the resident eccentric reviewer, I know that I do: I’ll be kinder to people if my Victoria sponge comes out of the oven even vaguely not burned, I’ll do my laundry – and the flatmate’s, too – if my cold goes away overnight, and I might even study harder for the next course if this exam is a miraculous pass.įor the protagonist of Genki Kawamura’s If Cats Disappeared from the World such trading is very real and, quite literally, a life and death situation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |