At a Glance
- Genre: Contemporary fable; magical realism
- Setting: Present-day Japan over the course of one extraordinary week
- Perspective: First-person, from a reserved postman facing his mortality
- Structure: A day-by-day countdown that doubles as a moral reckoning
Opening Hook
A man learns he’s dying and meets his exact double in a Hawaiian shirt. The double calls himself the Devil and offers a bargain: live one more day for every thing you erase from the world. Phones. Movies. Clocks. Then, the unthinkable—cats. Genki Kawamura’s If Cats Disappeared from the World turns a whimsical premise into a quietly devastating meditation on what makes life worth living.
Plot Overview
Monday: Diagnosis and a Devil in a Hawaiian Shirt
On a grim Monday, the 30-year-old Narrator—a quiet postman—learns he has a terminal brain tumor and only days left. He faints at home and wakes to a surreal sight: his flamboyant double, the Devil, who proposes a bargain—each day of life bought by erasing one thing from existence. The uneasy standoff and pact, captured in the Chapter 1-2 Summary, set the week’s strange rhythm.
Tuesday: Phones Vanish
The Devil’s first choice is the telephone. Before it disappears, the narrator is granted one last call. He dials his Ex-Girlfriend, and their reunion—filtered through memories of Buenos Aires and the small, shared rituals that once bound them—reveals how technology can both connect and cushion us from genuine intimacy. As the world falls quiet, loneliness sharpens, and the day’s events unfold in the Chapter 3-4 Summary.
Wednesday: Movies Fade to White
Next to go: movies. For a lifelong cinephile, this is a small apocalypse. With help from his encyclopedic friend Tsutaya, he arranges a private screening at the theater where his former lover works—but chooses to sit before a blank, glowing screen. In that luminous silence, he treats his life like a film: jump cuts of youthful blunders, tender B-sides of love, and every scene that shaped him.
Thursday: Clocks Stop
The third sacrifice—clocks—throws him back into the orbit of his estranged Father, a taciturn clock repairman. As a mischievous “bonus,” Aloha lets his cat, Cabbage, speak, and their conversations guide him through rooms of memory where his Mother still lingers. Without clocks, time loosens; love and memory refuse to obey its rules. This turning point is explored in the Chapter 5-6 Summary.
Friday: The Line We Won’t Cross
Then comes the Devil’s final test: delete cats and gain another day. The narrator recoils—Cabbage is his companion and his last living thread to his mother. His ex brings a posthumous letter from his mother, a tender inventory of what she loved about her son. The letter clarifies what time obscured, and the choice at the heart of the week crystallizes in the Chapter 7 Summary.
Saturday–Sunday: Choosing Love Over More Time
He refuses. If the price of living longer is to unmake the very things that give life meaning, the bargain isn’t life at all. He spends Saturday writing to his father—finally saying everything he avoided. At dawn on Sunday, dressed in his postman’s uniform, he bikes out to deliver the letter himself, ready to meet death with a steadier heart.
Central Characters
For a fuller cast and relationships, see the Character Overview.
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The Narrator: A modest postman whose terminal diagnosis jolts him from passive drift to a fierce, attentive gratitude. His week-long trial turns everyday objects into moral crossroads, revealing what he can and cannot live without.
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The Devil (Aloha): The narrator’s swaggering double, part tempter and part mirror. Aloha’s outlandish charm masks a harsher truth: he embodies the life of unexamined impulse—and the narrator’s unclaimed, regret-shadowed self.
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Cabbage: The cat who anchors the narrator to home, routine, and uncomplicated love. When granted speech, Cabbage becomes a guide through grief and memory—gentle, funny, and unflinchingly honest.
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The Mother: Present in recollection and a final letter, she provides the book’s moral north. Her ordinary wisdom about giving up to gain—and loving without measure—reshapes her son’s last choices.
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The Ex-Girlfriend: A conduit to the past and a compass in the present. Through their reunion, the narrator revisits tenderness and failure, learning to see what remains after a love ends.
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The Father: A craftsman who fixes timepieces and speaks in silences. The distance between father and son becomes the story’s quietest ache—and its last hope for repair.
Major Themes
For further analysis and connections across the book, visit the Theme Overview.
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Mortality and the Meaning of Life: Death’s approach compresses the narrator’s world, exposing what shines under pressure. The novel argues that meaning isn’t measured in days added, but in attention paid—to people, to ordinary beauty, to the small mercies of care.
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Loss, Memory, and Value: Each erasure removes more than an object; it dissolves the memories and rituals built around it. By staging losses we can’t control, the book shows how memory assigns value—and how absence teaches us to see.
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Human Connection and Relationships: Phones, films, and clocks organize how we relate, but they’re not the relationships themselves. As artifacts vanish, the narrator rediscovers companionship, filial duty, and the quiet labor of love that outlasts tools and trends.
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Regret and Acceptance: Aloha is the narrator’s regret made flesh—the self who might have chosen differently. The week becomes a practice in accepting a flawed life as fully one’s own, and in choosing love over the seductive fantasy of starting over.
Literary Significance
If Cats Disappeared from the World has the clean lines of a parable and the warmth of a personal confession. Its day-by-day structure reads like a film reel, each “cut” revealing how objects shape feeling and memory, while its gentle magical realism keeps the focus on human choices. The book speaks to a digitized age crowded with conveniences yet hungry for meaning, echoing modern fables like The Little Prince without imitation. Its enduring appeal lies in a simple truth expressed without sentimentality: a good life isn’t longer—it’s deeper, truer, and shared.