Syou Ishida’s amusing but poignant novel-in-stories, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat (translated by E. Madison Shimoda; 304 pages; Berkley) takes place in the fictional Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul in Kyoto. The Japanese clinic’s office on the fifth floor of a building seems to exist in a magical, liminal space, since it doesn’t show up on a phone navigation map or have a numbered street address. Rather, knowledge of the clinic is passed by word of mouth, and the office can be discovered only by those who are truly ready, at that moment, for a cat prescription. Many of the book’s human protagonists struggle to find the clinic, until they undergo the emotional development that allows them to be aware of their own crises.
And what is a cat prescription? Patients are led from the waiting room into the doctor’s office, only to find a genial, lean physician who sizes them up, makes very direct comments about their current states, and then chooses a specific cat for them to take home.
The book is onto something—sometimes people need connection in their lives, and an animal can fulfill that. We live in a pet-obsessed world where people relocate cities sometimes for the happiness of their animals, but ultimately these moves fuel their own happiness. Pets allow us to get closer to nature, and receive the delights and Instagram likes that cuteness engenders. Pets remind people that they are not droids or robots in this strange, post-technological age, but that they’re capable of an unconditional love, a trait that can feel anachronistic. Social media ensures narcissism will play an active role in human culture, but pets ensure that it won’t subsume us, or at least we’ll be less lonely, as it takes over.
Each story in the novel is labeled with a cat’s name—Bee, Margot, Koyo\uki, Tank and Tangerine (one patient gets two) and Mimita—and sometimes, their breed. The clinic draws patients who are on the border of crises. One of them is a financial analyst who needs to escape the dishonesty of his boss. His trajectory: he gets a cat from the clinic who scratches the car of the owner of a construction company; the owner and his wife like cats; they hire the former analyst to work and pay off his debt; the analyst likes the work and the entire situation brings him a new perspective on life. The patients’ stories generally follow this pattern of cat-dose to enlightenment, and the infusion of magical realism and the range of patients’ backgrounds transforms the potentially sappy elements of the book into delightful insights.
Ishida, who began writing fiction while working at a telecommunications company, paints emotions in a measured way, so that her protagonists are believable. There’s a teenager whose mother isn’t listening to her while she recounts peer bullying; a geisha who mourns the cat that left her; an aging businessman who feels alienated by work and family; and a bag designer who needs to fix her relationship with a milquetoast partner. While flawed, they all inspire sympathy.
Written almost as a simple set of offerings or recipes for changing perspectives, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat hits on some profound if difficult existential truths, one of them being that most of us are suffering to some degree, feeling alienated and lonely. Ishida’s novel honors pets for the comfort they offer that can blunt that pain.