Junji Ito's Cat Diary

My beloved husband keeps insisting that I read manga – or more specifically selected works from his extensive (and ever-growing) Junji Ito collection. In *general* I'm not a huge fan of the more commercial manga I've glanced at, but Junji Ito is undoubtedly in a league of his own. And I'll admit that it was easier to twist my arm and get me to read Junji Ito's Cat Diary because, well, cats. We've got the hardcover collector's edition and while the Cat Diary is not in Ito's usual creepy-AF, near-cosmic horror, what he does with the Cat Diary is special. Very special. 

For all his reputation for grim and exceptionally strange horror, what Ito does with this slim volume is tell us about his cats, Yon and Mu, and the (mis)adventures they experience. He fictionalises his life, casting himself as J-kun, and his then-fiancée A-ko in their own manga. The joy comes in with how he portrays life with these felines – darkly humorous takes that flirt with then subvert all the expected horror tropes he's known for. But with cats. And no one dies a grisly death, swallowed by a mountain or menaced by giant floating heads. Let's admit it: cats can be kinda creepy in their own way.

And I laughed. A lot. The little tales are short, so if you need to decompress after a torrid work day, then you'll most certainly gain a few much-needed chuckles that won't tax your concentration. I felt that this was almost a shorter, sweeter answer to Paul Gallico's The Silent Miaow (at least in my mind a vaguely comparable work). Interspersed between the strips we also have short interviews with Ito that offer small glimpses into his world. And he really does seem like a really lovely person (well, duh, he loves cats). Even if he draws his wife with no pupils in her eyes (which apparently made her rather vexed).

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, illustrated by Junji Ito

Most of the times that I've tried to get into manga, it's never stuck. Maybe I'm just showing my age or lack of sophistication. Who knows. But my husband has been a long-time fan of manga artist Junji Ito, who is apparently also a great lover of cats, which makes anyone a much better person, if you ask me. Ito is known chiefly for his horror manga, and I've glanced at some of the content and found it to be about as unsettling and oddly compelling as good art can be. 

So, when the husband splurged out on a hardcover copy of Ito's adaption of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, I allowed that now would be the time I'd get over myself and actually read manga. This is quality stuff, apparently. I was not disappointed.

Look, I'm a complete pleb. My first difficulty was getting used to reading a book from the back to front, and to read from right to left. I won't lie, it was jarring at first, but I got used to it. No Longer Human is the story about Yozo Oba. As a boy, he suffers terrible anxiety about people's opinions about him – so he is always clowning around to gain their approval, until the day his friend Takeichi sees right through Yozo's tactics to win others' approval.

What follows is a dark plunge into dissolution and existential horror, as Yozo makes one poor decision after another – it's like watching a train wreck. I eventually could not put down this hefty tome until I'd reached the last, terrible sequence. As an aside, Dazai himself suffered a tragic ending, which is eerily prescient in the narrative of his writing.

I'll be honest, I know next to nothing about manga. Also, please don't recommend other books to me in the hopes that I will read them. I'm incredibly picky. Why I liked No Longer Human was the terrible authenticity of the telling and the unrelenting, crushing existential dread. My own life feels like cherry blossoms in comparison. Ito's art is clean and doesn't have that sameness that I've picked up in other manga that I've glanced at. In fact, the level of detail in those black and white strokes is absolutely staggering and rather hypnotic. We have a huge pile of his books here at home, and I expect at some point I'll dip into them when the mood fits.