A beautifully moving tale of loss and reaching out to the ones we love, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.

Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week . . .

Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself – and his beloved cat – to the brink. Genki Kawamura's If Cats Disappeared from the World is a story of loss and reconciliation, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.

This beautiful tale is translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland, who also translated The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. Fans of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles will also surely love If Cats Disappeared from the World.

The Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo. They work at home as freelance writers. They no longer have very much to say to one another. One day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. She is a beautiful creature. She leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. New, small joys accompany the cat; the days have more light and colour. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife; they go walking together, talk and share stories of the cat and its little ways, play in the nearby Garden. But then something happens that will change everything again. The Guest Cat is an exceptionally moving and beautiful novel about the nature of life and the way it feels to live it. Written by Japanese poet and novelist Takashi Hiraide, the book won Japan's Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, and was a bestseller in France and America.

A bestseller in France and winner of Japan s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. It leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. Soon they are buying treats for the cat and enjoying talks about the animal and all its little ways. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife the days have more light and color. The novel brims with new small joys and many moments of staggering poetic beauty, but then something happens .

As Kenzaburo Oe has remarked, Takashi Hiraide s work "really shines." His poetry, which is remarkably cross-hatched with beauty, has been acclaimed here for "its seemingly endless string of shape-shifting objects and experiences, whose splintering effect is enacted via a unique combination of speed and minutiae.""

Arc Tangent is composed of two prose-poem sequences, "Arc Tangent" and "Table of Primaries," hybrid works made up of prose, poetry and fragments collaged from a working notebook, and occasionally using appropriated text. Both pieces show evidence of Selland's deep roots in the American Modernist tradition and his lifelong experience with the language and poetry of Japan. His writing is dense, allusive, philosophically informed, and combines the surprise and formal interest of collage with a striking unity of tone, a haibun-like lyricism, and a powerful engagement with issues of displacement, exile and "at-home-ness." "Eric Selland's lyric work possesses a poise and nuance reminiscent of the French symbolist vision of Japonisme, wherein the slightest brushstroke or flute-breath causes the entire universe to veer. This is writing that moves along the verge of the unsayable, enacting a deep study of the mystery of everyday life" (Andrew Joron). "Arc Tangent's exquisite collage challenges our perception like a delicate puzzle whose truths intersect, changing as they move through the present moment, yet fitting together perfectly even as they pass. Your hand finds comfort turning these pages, image disappears into question then reappears profoundly unanswered, as sound submerges amid clear water" (Colleen Lookingbill).