In the wildly popular 2024 Japanese novel “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat,” penned by award-winning Kyoto-born Japanese author Syou Ishida and translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda, you will go on a quick, quirky ride set in Kyoto that is cat-centric, playful and surprisingly relatable.
At the heart of it is the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul, a peculiar place that seemingly appears and disappears at will. It is visible only to those truly in need of some serious healing.
Once you eventually find it, you are greeted by a particularly heavy door and a doctor who seems to laugh at almost everything.
At the end of each visit, the reluctant “patient” is handed a prescription: a cat they are meant to take home for an average dose of 10 days. A paper bag of cat food and personalized instructions on how to deal with the animal are to be picked up on the way out.
None of these new pet guardians feel like their chosen cat would last that long. And they would all be right — by being wrong.
