Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Summary
In “The Cat Who Saved the Books” the protagonist is the high school student Rintaro Natsuki. Rintaro has grown up working in his grandfather’s secondhand bookstore. Now that his grandfather has passed away, Rintaro have to close the Natsuki book for good. Then a talking cat named Tiger appears to ask for the boy’s help in saving books with him. Soon afterwards,Rintaro and the cat set out to save books from four mysterious labyrinths.
The Cat Who Saved the Books contains four labyrinths, both a classical reference too the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur, and the more modern interpretation of the labyrinth as a journey to self-discovery. Throughout the novel, Rintaro Natsuki confronts monsters in the form of people who mistreat books, as well as his own demons. Through his journey, Rintaro meets a man who reads one hundred books a month, a speed reader who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read and a publisher who only want to publish bestsellers. Their adventures end in the last labyrinth that awaits leads Rintaro down a realm only the bravest dare enters.
Author Information
Sosuke Natsukawa is a Japanese physician and novelist, born in Osaka Prefecture in 1978. He graduated from the Shinshu University medical school and practices medicine at a hospital in the largely rural prefecture of Nagano. His multi-volume debut novel, Kamisama no Karute, published in 2009, won several prizes and sold over three million copies in Japan. The Cat Who Saved Books is set to be translated into over twenty languages around the world.