Cat, the Great Detective / 猫には推理がよく似合う

Cat, the Great Detective is a mystery novel that, you may have guessed from the title and cover, features a cat. Our protagonist is Kaori Tsubaki, a legal assistant and the sole employee of an old, semi-retired lawyer. It’s a pretty chill job, but the main perk is the fact that the lawyer keeps his late wife’s cat at the office—and Kaori loves cats. In fact, she spends every Sunday in the office so Scottie won’t be alone. Scottie is the titular cat, and everyone else calls him Hyouta, but Kaori knows his name is actually Scottie, since he’s a Scottish Fold. How does Kaori know Scottie’s name is actually Scottie? She asked him. (Kaori can hear Scottie speak.)

I don’t want to get deeper into the plot since its trajectory is part of the story, but I will say that Cat is not a traditional murder mystery. The first half of the book is pretty slow. The lawyer is semi-retired but still has a few clients, so it takes some time to introduce them and their cases, but then the plot does actually happen in the second half. 

Cat ended up better than I expected, but still just didn’t quite do it for me. For one, I couldn’t stop rolling my eyes at Kaori. While I love legitimately insane protagonists (see Raging Loop and Hurting Distance, for instance), Kaori just wasn’t quite the proper flavor of eccentric. She loves cats and Scottie, but it doesn’t propel her into ridiculous situations, and she’s also just so gosh-darn wholesome about it all. 

Although, by the end of the book, I did wonder if Miki had similar feelings on Kaori as I did… The writing seems so earnest regarding Kaori for the bulk of the book. If only they had peeled back the facade a bit sooner, perhaps I would have felt a stronger kinship. 

On the plot side, while the clueing is perfectly competent, from a meta point of view the culprit is extremely obvious. Some deductions are decent and grounded, but a fair number feel more like spinning out baseless conjecture to fit a preconceived conclusion rather than a logical deduction from the evidence. Perhaps this type of plot fits the setting—daily life in a small, cozy law office—but I personally want the grand, over-the-top tricks in architecturally improbable mansions that have been cut off from the world by some contrived mechanism. 

One thing I did really like about Cat is that the day-to-day office work and discussions with the lawyer felt real. I think that for many authors there is a discernible difference between when they write about high specialized fields they are well-versed in and those that they are not (I could tell that Lisa Scottoline was an attorney and not a psychiatrist), and I was not surprised to discover after reading that Akiko Miki is, in fact, an attorney. So Cat provides a nice little window into the world of small Japanese legal offices. (If nothing else, it’s probably more accurate than Ace Attorney.) 

In the end, I suppose I’m lukewarm on Cat. It’s not a talking cat mystery, it’s a mystery where the protagonist just happens to talk with a cat. (Despite the title, Scottie isn't the one to solve the case!) I suppose it wasn’t trying to be a talking cat mystery, but if you’re going to betray our expectations you’d better have something really good to offer in return, and what Cat offers is merely fine. I don’t think Cat, the Great Detective is a bad book, but I’m sure there are more cat-centric mysteries out there.

Before I go, two small tidbits on the title: First, the Japanese title actually means "Deductions Suit Cats Well," and second, it appears the cover of the paperback version actually says "Cay, the Great Detective."