#BookReview: The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai

#BookReview: The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal KawaiThe Cat Who Saved the Library (The Cat Who..., #2) by Sōsuke Natsukawa, Louise Heal Kawai
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, coming of age, fantasy, libraries, magical realism
Series: The Cat Who... #2
Pages: 224
Published by HarperVia on April 8, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The long-awaited sequel to the #1 international bestseller The Cat Who Saved Books—a delightful and heartwarming celebration of books, libraries, cats, and the people who love them.
A chronic asthma condition prevents thirteen-year-old Nanami from playing sports or spending time with her friends after school. But nothing can stop her from one of her favorite activities. Nanami loves to read and happily spends much of her free time in the school library, cocooned among the stacks.
Then one day, Nanami notices that, despite the library being as deserted as ever, some of her favorite books, including literary classics like Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar and Anne of Green Gables are disappearing from the shelves. When she alerts the library staff, they dismiss her concerns. But just as Nanami is about to return to her reading, she spots a suspicious man in a gray suit. Eager to discover what he’s up to, she follows him. The chase is cut short when Nanami suffers an asthma attack. By the time she catches her breath, the man has disappeared and all that is left behind is a mysterious light filtering through the library’s familiar passageways.
That’s when Tiger, the talking tabby cat who saves books, comes to the rescue.
Are Nanami and Tiger prepared to face the dangerous challenges that lie ahead? Why are faceless gray soldiers burning books in a stone castle? And what happened to Rintaro, the socially withdrawn hero who helped Tiger save books in a second-hand bookshop?
At a time of increased book bannings worldwide, Sosuke Natsukawa urges us not to underestimate the power of great literature—and to be prepared to defend our freedom to choose.

My Review:

I picked this up for the obvious. It’s clearly a story about a cat, and books, and at least one library, and I’m there for all of those things. That it’s also the follow-up to The Cat Who Saved Books, which I enjoyed very much for all the above reasons – although that’s about a bookstore rather than a library – certainly helped push this book to the top of my virtually towering TBR pile.

Nanami Kosaki is a bit younger than Rintaro Natsuki was when he began his adventure in that first book. Howsomever, she is also very much a child, or a young woman, on the cusp of the next stage of her own maturity, and she is also holding herself back from taking the next leap forward. Rintaro also faced barriers to that next leap, but in Nanami’s case those hurdles are created not just out of fear, but also out of love. And out of the desire that is so often fostered in females, the desire not to upset the people who are only creating those boundaries and barriers because they love us, believe they know what’s best for us, but want us to be safe above all, even if safety is not what we’re built for.

Nanami has chronic asthma that results in severe attacks that leave her completely debilitated if she is not very, very careful. Nanami, a junior high school student, has internalized that need for care at every step to the point where her world has been reduced to the smallest circle possible; the home she shares with her workaholic father, her school, the local library, and the one and only friend who doesn’t treat her as ‘less than’ in every conversation and at every turn.

Like so many people whose movements are restricted in one way or another, Nanami spends a great deal of time in the world of books – hence her daily visits to her local library. She has learned the wisdom of the saying that “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”

But her thorough knowledge of every nook and cranny of that library tells Nanami that something is wrong. Books are missing. Not the usual ebb and flow of check-in and check-out of a public library but rather that vast swaths of books are disappearing all at once and not coming back.

A situation that absolutely cannot be borne. Which is where Tiger the Tabby steps through the back wall of the library, allowing her to follow the mysterious book thief back to his own world. A place where books aren’t merely burned, but where they are torn from time and space and memory so they lose their power to move the world through the hearts and minds of the people who read them.

Escape Rating B: The US cover of this second book doesn’t do Tiger the Tabby any more justice than the US cover of the first book did. Tiger’s considerably more dignified picture in the UK cover at right also does a much better job of giving Tiger his due.

But this story isn’t about Tiger any more than the first one was. Tiger is an important character, but his function in both stories is to open the way and guide the protagonist – not to lead the charge.

The stakes feel higher in this second book on multiple levels. On one level, it’s about Nanami and her future, just as the first book was about Rin and his. He was on the precipice of choosing between out and in, between rejecting the world and facing it. Nanami’s decision is harder because she’s not so much choosing between safety and adventure as she is choosing between letting her illness and the people who love her take care of her, or figuring out how to face the world as it is and her condition as it is on her own terms. To expand her real horizons to the limit that they can be – a limit that may not be infinite but is considerably larger than feels ‘safe’ to the people who love her and worry about her. She’ll have to stand her own ground against people who truly do mean well, to defend her corner against a world that will push hard to keep her in that corner, even when her asthma exhausts her to the point of passing out.

That the fight that Tiger the Tabby guides her to is, to her, much bigger than the mere fight for life, gives her a springboard of accomplishment from which to wage that fight, but she has to get there first.

Which is where the heart of the story, and the depth of Nanami’s heart, comes in.

Because, while this is about the books, it’s not just about the books. And it’s certainly not about the books as containers – even though it feels that way at first. This is a story about the power of what’s in books to move people – which moves the world.

Which leads even deeper, to a story about power, and how power is applied, and those who feel they have the right to keep their hands on the levers of power. Leading to a story that feels like it’s speaking to this moment, even though this book was published over a year ago in the original Japanese, and was intended to point at the vast (and continuing and increasing) amount of book banning that was – and still is – happening around the world.

In the end, this is a story that focuses hard on the very current debate about whether empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is a strength or a weakness. The forces arrayed against Nanami believe that empathy is a weakness. That reading the ‘wrong’ books fosters empathy and should therefore be eliminated by any means necessary.

Nanami believes the opposite, that empathy is a strength, although she would certainly agree that reading is a powerful force for fostering empathy. And it’s the power of Nanami’s heart, her empathy for others and their empathy for her, that means that she never goes into this battle alone, and that she emerges with new strength, a whole heart, and a whole lot of books, when her battle is won.

But it’s clear at the end that the war is not over. As it is not in the real world. Nanami seems to have found her road to her OWN future at the end of this story, and we get a glimpse of Rintaro’s life as it is now to see that he also reached out and grabbed his own happiness and fulfillment, but Tiger the Tabby is still out there, just waiting to guide a new hero to the next front of this neverending conflict.

 

Review: The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Review: The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke NatsukawaThe Cat Who Saved Books by Sōsuke Natsukawa, Louise Heal Kawai
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, coming of age, fantasy, magical realism
Series: The Cat Who... #1
Pages: 198
Published by HarperVia on December 7, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A celebration of books, cats, and the people who love them, infused with the heartwarming spirit of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles.
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for—or rather, demands—the teenager’s help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and Tiger and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners. 
Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers. Their adventures culminate in one final, unforgettable challenge—the last maze that awaits leads Rintaro down a realm only the bravest dare enter...

My Review:

When we first meet Rintaro Natsuki, he has come to a fork in his road, at the point where he’s going to have to take it whether he wants to or not. He’s just been orphaned for the second time. When his parents died, he was still a child, and packed off to his grandfather without any choice or protest on his part.

At his grandfather’s death, Rintaro is in high school, even if he skips class a lot. He’s old enough to have a voice in his future – if he can come to terms with the reality of his loss. And if he can manage to reach out of his own social isolation to take it.

His legacy from his grandfather is a beautiful, marvelous and just barely profitable second-hand bookstore. A place that Rintaro has no desire to leave, but he seems to have no option to stay. At least not until the talking cat Tiger the Tabby swaggers out of the back of the bookstore and demands that Rintaro come with him on a journey to save books.

Rintaro loves books and reading. He also has nothing better to do and no motivation to do it. So he follows the cat through the suddenly endless book stacks and emerges into a labyrinth of wonder and danger. He’ll need not just courage and a bit of cunning, but every single drop of his love of reading to save the endangered books – and himself along the way.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this one up for the cat and the books, in that order. Which reminds me that the cat pictured on the US cover does not do Tiger the Tabby justice. The UK cover (pictured at left) does a much better job of giving Tiger his due.

But the story, of course, isn’t really about the cat. It is, however, at least in part about the way that cats – or any companion animals – can save us even from ourselves if we just let them. And the way that books and reading can give us time and space and tools to save ourselves if we let them into our minds just as the cats do when we let them into our hearts.

It’s also a bit of magical realism that leads into a very modern type of fairy tale. Tiger leads Rintaro into a series of labyrinths where books and reading are under assault in the guise of the love of books combined with bowing and scraping to market pressures and other distractions of modern life to save books by means that will, in the end, destroy them.

I think the story does conflate the love of the container – the physical book – with the love of what it contains and the experience of reading. I’m a bit concerned about that as I’m mostly an ebook reader because the genres I read are not widely represented in large print. If I were confined to the physical artifact I’d miss out on the thing I really want out of reading – the immersion in the story that the physical AND the electronic article contain and present for my enjoyment.

I digress just a bit.

What makes The Cat Who Saved Books such a lovely little read, however, is the totality of Rintaro’s journey. Not just the thoughtfully scary labyrinths where books go to die in the name of loving them, but Rintaro’s first steps on that path to adulthood. Because the story is about Rintaro’s chance to choose his life. To stay a socially withdrawn hikikomori, always dependent on someone else to deal with the world he has retreated from, or to take up the reins of the bookstore and his own life and learn to stand on his own. And that’s the part of the story that grabs the heart in its sharp, feline claws.

Because this is a book about books and reading, I can’t resist leaving this review without including a couple of readalikes. Any reader of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld will recognize that the way the back of the bookstore opens into endless shelves means that the store connects to ‘L’ space, the liminal place where all great libraries connect. The Discworld is not at all like The Cat Who Saved Books but that love of reading certainly exists in both places. The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury is another lovely story about someone looking for a purpose who finds it in books and reading and loving them and the people she associates with them. And last but not least, more in tone than in specific, “All the World’s Treasures” by Kimberly Pauley, included in Never Too Old to Save the World, a story about a young woman inheriting a shop from her grandmother and discovering that there are connections to more places and infinitely more treasures than she ever imagined.