Meh. Somewhat funny, some cringe-worthy, just okay. Why did I read the whole thing? Not sure. It goes pretty quick in one sitting, because most pages are fight scenes, which bore me.
Tale of stray cats in a city, that are depicted as street gangs. When there’s no people around, they’re shown as humans. Kind of odd. You can easily tell which person is supposed to be which cat, though. I did appreciate that this seems to be showing how rough and unpleasant a stray cat’s life actually is- they’re mostly facing off with other males to defend territory and control who has access to females and food. In this story, the main cat gang has one female “molly” they protect, run by an orange tabby guy called Taiga. A young tough (brown tabby) named Ryuusei shows up, looking for a scarred male calico. Ends up fighting the gang leader, chastised for not knowing the rules of the turf (he doesn’t want to have to follow any rules, that’s why living “free” on the streets). Impresses the female (though she won’t admit it) when he beats Taiga, but then he runs off, not wanting to take over the leadership role- which is the usual protocol. When a rival gang takes the female Mii captive, they all go together to confront them, but it’s pretty funny how the other cats ditch them along the way- a few get scared off by a dog, three stop to paw at a lizard, another trio are distracted by a shopkeeper offering scraps, etc. until only Ryuusei and Taiga are on the edge of the territory to face their enemies. Also funny how they’d be deeply involved in these tense faceoffs with rivals, when ordinary people will show up “awww, kitties, how cute!” to these battle-scarred toms that are engaged in matters of life and death- from their view. By the end of the book, the two main characters have joined forces, Ryuusei seems to have found who he was looking for (the rival gang’s new leader is a large scarred calico) and I was eyeing the rest of the stack wondering if I wanted to continue. Mild curiosity where the story’s going, even though I don’t care for all the fighting and gratuitous rear ends (of the male cats, and the female Mii when she’s in human form).
The artwork is kind of odd, totally agree with some of the other reviews you can find on that. Sometimes the cats have humanlike poses that look strange, or their legs are in awkward positions. But when they’re shown as humans, they often take wild leaps that no human could accomplish, hold their hands like claws, etc. I don’t know why the main cat Ryuusei has that very well-defined star marking on his chest. I did think it pretty funny that in one scene he’s supposed to be fighting some of the rival gang members, who found him stuck in a cardboard box he’d squished himself into, to take a nap. Spent half the fight getting knocked around because he couldn’t get out of the box.
Borrowed from the public library.
2 Responses
The idea of cats turning into humans when no one is around to see does sound really odd, but kind interesting as well.
On the gratuitous rear ends, Japanese people seem to love cat balls for some reason. There are so many cute cat figures… until you see the back and the pair of balls hanging there.
Um, yeah, exactly. So many feline testicles in these books. I started to just ignore that after a while. I got the idea that showing the cats as humans was to give us a way to relate to what their lives are like, as difficult and tough as living on the streets, part of a gang. With all the violence and backbiting and strife. Like interpreting pet’s lifespans “in human years” so you have a more accurate idea of how old they actually feel, maybe.