I found more cat manga series! Very cute and lighthearted, a breezy read in one sitting. It has exactly the same starting premise as Paul Gallico’s The Abandoned– though the rest is entirely different. High school boy gets hit by a car, wakes up in the body of a cat named Nyao. He thinks it’s a dream at first, takes joy in exploring what the cat body can do- scale trees, land on his feet, leap distances several times his own length- but then gets beat up by some local street cats when he approaches them with friendly intentions. Realizing this isn’t a dream he’ll wake up from, Nyao is at a loss what to do, but then gets taken in by a girl from his school, who keeps him as a pet. The girl Chika is awkward and clumsy, but tender-hearted and kind. (No idea why she lives by herself, but I suppose that will get revealed in future volumes).
So now Nyao has to adjust both to being in a cat body, and to living with a girl who has no compunctions about things like watching him pee in the litter box, or changing clothes in front of him (he always turns away). It’s a shock, to say the least. He wants most of all to figure out how to get back to his human self, but gets distracted by things like having his belly rubbed and taking delightful naps. Nyao doesn’t know how to groom his fur, so Chika ends up giving him a bath– very unpleasant. He feels ill and gets taken to the vet, with all the indignities that entails. He’s frustrated by inability to open doors at first, but figures out how to slide a window and starts exploring outside (when Chika is away at school or work). He finds the hospital and glimpses his human self through a window- in a coma- but can’t get into the building. At one point he’s delighted to have the opportunity to learn what secret things girls do when they hang out together- but it’s actually boring when Chika’s friend comes over (who definitely does not like cats)- they just sit around reading or talking. It was all amusing and funny, but there was something slightly off.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. Something not quite smooth about the writing, abrupt shifts between panels that took me off guard, or odd way things were phrased so I wouldn’t know what the characters meant. Perhaps it was the translation. The storytelling was just a bit rough. Also, the book is divided into ten chapters, and every single one had a few pages introducing what had happened at the beginning, why this boy was now a cat. That got old. It was enough to dampen my enjoyment of the book, thus the rating. But I’m moving on to the rest, see how they go.
Borrowed from the public library.
