Cat Food is a book about man-eating shape-shifting magic cats.
In the world of Cat Food cats can talk and have their very own laws and society, hidden just beyond our own. A very small percentage of cats are born with the ability to shape-shift and are known as “bakeneko”. So what happens when a group of unsuspecting humans visit an island full of bakeneko trying to kill them? Well, presumably nothing good for the humans...
Cat Food is Tomoki Morikawa’s debut work. I already knew from Two Detectives and One Watson that he likes to subvert traditional structure, but the premise alone makes Cat Food. This isn’t a murder mystery, and one could argue that it isn’t a “mystery” at all—but it’s a fair-play suspense story, so it satisfies the same itch as traditional mysteries: Cat Food provides clever, elegant solutions to logical problems. The problems to be solved here are absurd, fantastic scenarios that could never happen in real life, but they are still logical problems.
Coming into this book, I thought it was going to be about the humans having to figure out which “person” among them is actually a bakeneko in disguise trying to kill them all. Turns out it’s nearly the opposite. One of the “humans” is indeed a bakeneko in disguise. His name is Willie, he’s the protagonist, and he’s trying to save the humans. The story takes place on a resort island that is actually an elaborate trap created by the bakeneko Pluto in order to capture humans and turn them into high-quality food to be sold to cats. Willie infiltrates a group of humans taking a vacation to Pluto’s island, with neither Willie nor the humans realizing the true nature of their destination. Soon Pluto and the other bakeneko running the island discover that one of the humans is Willie in disguise—but, crucially, they don’t know which human. This is an issue for them, since killing humans is fine, but murdering other cats is against cat law. Willie, in turn, discovers Pluto wants to kill the humans—but he decides to protect them. The plot then becomes a cat-and-cat game of Pluto trying to figure out which “human” is Willie and Willie trying to remain undetected.
The logical problem is clear: figure out the bakeneko from a group of humans. Although the story involves magic, supernatural mysteries are fine as long as you have clearly-delineated rules governing the magic. (For a wonderful example of this, look no further than Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney.) The details of bakeneko’s powers aren’t comprehensively listed, but we’re given enough detail to fairly play along. Bakeneko can morph their bodies into any animal, object, or material, within the size range of a ping pong ball to a car. They can partially morph and control their individual body parts even when transformed (for instance, if they turned into a blender, they’d be able to control and move around their electric cord), but also still remain living things (if you plugged in the bakeneko blender, the cat would just get electrocuted). They can perform the mechanical movements of what they transform in, but only to the level of a biological animal (the bakeneko blender would be able to rotate its blender blades, but only as fast as its muscles could spin them).
This makes things tough for both Pluto and Willie. Willie can perfectly imitate a human, which means there appears to be absolutely no method to smoke him out if he simply manages to keep looking and acting like a human. Conversely for Willie, since literally anything and everything could be Pluto or one of her underlings in disguise, he can’t afford to let his disguise drop for a moment.
Cat Food’s greatest weakness is that it just does’t have quite enough content to feel fully satisfying. We have an awesomely unique premise, but only a couple of tactics get used before the book is over. It’s short, and the fact that at the conclusion I still wanted more of the book speaks well of it—but it’s still short.
The characters are also another clear weakness. Willie and Pluto are developed enough, but most of the other characters have no development or personality. Most of them are obviously only there because the plot simply demands that human and bakeneko bodies exist on the island. Cat Food is actually the first book in a series about a detective named Sanzunokawa Kotowari, but even he doesn’t get too much development.
That being said, Cat Food is still really fun. As expected based on the other Morikawa book I’ve read, the ideas and tricks are clever, and we’re given all the clues and information necessary to tackle the problem ourselves. The characters display actual intelligence, and their actions make sense. The writing is modern and easy to digest, and thoroughly explains the characters’ thought processes. Sometimes the prose might feel a bit too casual or self-indulgent, but that’s a minor quibble.
Cat Food is also the most legitimately suspenseful book I’ve read in a while. You see...
Sanzunokawa ends up on the cats’ side.
Whenever a work features multiple species, the humans are always the good guys, and the humans always win out. Plus the protagonist, Willie, is working to save the humans. They aren’t going to just have the main character fail, are they? And the humans in question here are ordinary, innocent high school students. Morikawa wouldn’t just kill them all off, right? Yes, murder mysteries inherently involve death, but not pointless massacre. The protagonist and the humans have to win!
But in a mystery novel, the detective always succeeds. I mean, if they fail and don’t solve the crime, then what kind of book would that be? Sanzunokawa is Morikawa’s main detective! He isn’t just some one-off character that we can turn into a loser and then never see again. Who would write a series about a detective that keeps on failing? The detective can’t lose!
So we have two almost foundational tropes directly at odds with each other, and I had no idea which one was going to win out in the end. Normally the detective is the protagonist so the fact that the detective will succeed is taken for granted. But the detective is in fact opposing the protagonist here and the plot does not involve a “crime” that needs to be “solved,” so the outcome of the story cannot be guessed from tropes alone, making it a true surprise which direction the conclusion takes.
If you want a fun, quirky story that isn’t a murder mystery but scratches the same itch, Cat Food is the perfect book. Cat Food’s portion size might be a bit small, but it has a delectable flavor that you won’t find anywhere else.
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