This was a wonderfully quiet calm book. A couple meet a neighbour's cat and slowly become friends with it, welcoming it into their house and lives as an 'honoured guest'. The minutiae of the cat's activities, and the joy in watching it, are described. The story moves slowly and quietly through the seasons and years, telling me much about the sort of area the writer and his wife live in; the Japanese society they inhabit, and how you can come to love an animal that just wanders into your life, that you never touch. Beware, it gets sad. But there's hope at the end too.
This book proves that nothing much needs to happen, that there's no great need of 'conflict' in books, contrary to current wisdom and expectation. Just hearing about this small string of shushy events was enough. It was thoughtful, and spare and very real. And at the end there is a confusion of events and timings that puzzles and pains the author - and that was perhaps the realest moment in the whole book. Knowing there are some things you will never never understand, and that time has taken them, they're gone, you can't search for 'the truth' or evidence or reasons. You will never *know* some things. So human. This book was a tiny gem.
(Also posted on my goodreads feed.)
