Genki Kawamura’s If Cats Disappeared from the World uses a slender fable to probe life’s largest questions: what makes a life meaningful, what we truly value when time runs out, and how memory binds people to one another. A devil’s bargain—extra days in exchange for erasing things from the world—turns abstract ideas into lived experiments, revealing how love, grief, and everyday objects quietly define a person’s existence.
Major Themes
Mortality and the Meaning of Life
Bold theme name: Mortality and the Meaning of Life Confronted with imminent death, the narrator tests whether living longer is worth the cost of dismantling the world he knows. The devil’s bargain becomes a moral X-ray, stripping away distractions until the narrator sees that meaning isn’t measured in duration or accomplishments, but in the care and connections that have shaped him. His refusal to erase cats—and his acceptance of death—reframes “more time” as empty without love to fill it.
Loss, Memory, and Value
Bold theme name: Loss, Memory, and Value Each disappearance exposes how value resides less in utility than in the memories and relationships an object carries. Phones vanish, revealing both the shallow comfort of constant contact and the tenderness preserved in remembered conversations; movies disappear, taking with them a shared language of affection and friendship; clocks go, and with them an inherited sense of identity and craft. The novel insists that absence clarifies essence: only when something is gone do we see what it really held for us.
Human Connection and Relationships
Bold theme name: Human Connection and Relationships As technologies and timekeepers fall away, bonds with others emerge as the nonnegotiables of a meaningful life. Reaching out to an old love, seeking reconciliation with a parent, and protecting a beloved pet culminate in the realization that being with and for others is the true measure of a life. The narrator ultimately chooses love—even at the cost of his own survival.
Supporting Themes
Regret and Acceptance
Bold theme name: Regret and Acceptance Quiet regrets—estranged family, faded romance, taken-for-granted kindness—initially define the narrator’s self-understanding. The bargain personifies regret as a tempter, but the week’s experiments convert remorse into insight, and self-reproach into gratitude. Acceptance arrives when the narrator stops bargaining with time and starts honoring the imperfect, love-marked life he actually lived.
Modernity vs. Simplicity
Bold theme name: Modernity vs. Simplicity Erasing phones and clocks critiques a culture of immediacy and schedules that simulates connection while breeding anxiety. In their absence, the narrator discovers presence: slower rhythms, face-to-face gestures, and a less quantified but more felt experience of time. The novel suggests that simplicity isn’t nostalgia—it’s the condition for noticing one another.
Theme Interactions
Mortality catalyzes valuation: the nearness of death presses the narrator to ask what, if lost, would unmake who he is. That urgency turns loss into a teacher, as each erasure tests whether convenience, entertainment, or timekeeping can substitute for love—and finds they can’t. The path from regret to acceptance runs through relationship: by repairing bonds and protecting what embodies love, the narrator embraces an ending that affirms the life within it.
- Mortality → Connection: Knowing time is short clarifies which relationships deserve final words and acts.
- Loss → Memory → Value: When objects vanish, the memories they carried surface, revealing why they mattered.
- Modernity vs. Simplicity → Connection: Removing technological scaffolding exposes genuine intimacy—and its absence.
Character Embodiment
The Narrator
As both test subject and witness, the narrator’s arc maps the book’s moral geometry: from numbness and cliché to discernment and courage. His last choices—reaching out, reconciling, and refusing to erase cats—translate abstract themes into lived truth.
The Mother
Her illness, quiet sacrifices, and parting letter model a love-centered metric of meaning. Her oft-repeated wisdom—that every gain entails a loss—frames the bargain and guides the narrator from regret toward gratitude.
The Father
A clockmaker whose craft disappears with the clocks, he embodies how identity can hinge on time’s structures. Reconciliation with him shows that relationships outlast roles, and that acceptance often arrives through humble, in-person gestures.
The Ex-Girlfriend
Phones and movies archive their love story; when those vanish, what remains are the feelings and habits of care beneath them. She represents how memory can both sting and sustain—and how connection can persist without its original forms.
Tsutaya
A friend defined through shared movies, he illustrates how culture becomes a shorthand for intimacy. His presence underscores that friendship is built from small, repeated exchanges that become part of one’s identity.
Cabbage
The cat embodies unconditional companionship and the ordinary miracle of being seen. Choosing Cabbage over life itself proves that love, not longevity, is the story’s final value.
The Devil (Aloha)
Part tempter, part mirror, he externalizes the narrator’s regrets and rationalizations. His bargains force ethical clarity, turning the invisible scaffolding of meaning into visible choices.
Thematic Development
- Monday: Despair breeds superficial wishes, revealing how far the narrator is from his own values.
- Midweek: Erasing phones and movies reopens old bonds, teaching him that shared memories are the true archive of love.
- Late week: Without clocks—and with cats at stake—family, identity, and tenderness come into focus.
- Final days: He rejects the bargain, chooses connection over survival, and accepts an ending that honors his life.
Universal Messages
- The value of life is measured in connection, not duration.
- Absence reveals essence; appreciate what holds your memories now.
- Regret belongs to every life; acceptance comes from honoring the love inside it.
- Meaning lives in small fidelities—calls made, letters delivered, a cat kept safe.