If Cats Disappeared From The World by Genki Kawamura – Translated from the Japanese by Eric Salland and Published by Picador 2018

What would you give for an extra day of life?

What difference would it make if iPhones or cats or anything else no longer existed? Do doppelgängers really appear when you’re about to die?

You may be wondering why the narrator would pose such questions. And anyway, what if it was the narrator who was the one to disappear from the world?

All in all, it was an odd week, a week to write a letter and, more surprisingly perhaps, to discover your cat can talk. But, before we get to that, let’s go back a bit. Not as far as the day of the devastating diagnosis, just to the bit where the Devil appears. Aloha!

In films, people make lists of the things they want to do before they die; I’m guessing they don’t focus on the fact that they didn’t need to buy so many groceries

In the end though, what really makes life worth living? Maybe Cabbage has the answer….

A strange and thought-provoking story.