This felt like a high school or early college student wrote this after receiving a writing prompt.

The narrator was uninspiring and overly cliched in all his observations, the cat/owner relationship didn’t feel natural, it felt shoehorned into the overall “self discovery” theme of the story, and I got nothing out of this book. It reads as a middle grade book, but the protagonist is 30 so surely the author intended for it to be for adults, which makes it even more frustrating.

The impacts of the narrator’s decisions didn’t seem to be all that important. The book felt more like a thought experiment by a wandering mind than a coherent or meaningful novel.

My only hope is maybe the translator wasn’t very skilled at understanding the semantics and mood of the original text and that the work in Japanese comes across as having more depth and being more refined.

I only finished this because it was for a book club.