Review: We'll Prescribe You a Cat - Syou Ishida

Genre: Cozy Fiction, Magical Realism

Published: Doubleday, September 2024, originally published March 2023 My Rating: 1/5 stars

“The amount of time you spent together probably matters, but less time doesn’t mean less love. Whether it’s a day or year, human or cat, and even if we may never see them again, there are those who are irreplaceable in our lives.”

This is such an easy recommendation for many readers, yet such an easy DNF for me. If you love cozy Japanese fiction like Before the Coffee Gets Cold or What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, you’ll likely love this book. I’m just learning that this is a genre that doesn’t work for me.

The novel consists of 5 interlinked short-stories, connected by a mental-health clinic where, no matter their ailment, patients are prescribed a cat to cure them. You can very likely predict what happens from there: through a series of whimsical hijinks and cat-chaos, the protagonist learns a valuable lesson about slowing down and caring for something without expecting (material) payment in return.

To me, this genre is the book-equivalent of cotton-candy. It’s a crowd-pleasing comfortfood; easy, fluffy and sweet, with a nostalgia for simpler times. Yet beyond that initial sweetness, it dissolves on your tongue, and you realize there’s actually zero substance to it. The way these books boil down very complex life-questions (and often even mental-health-issues like depression, even though that’s not too present here thankfully) to an over-simplified solution, just rubs me the wrong way. Plus, I think my personal tolerance for sticky-sweetness is just very low…

Overall, I’ll take all the cat-cuddles (or dog-cuddles, even better!) in real life any day. In book-form though, they just don’t work the same way for me.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.