The Cat Who Saved Books
— Worth the detour
About
When his bookseller grandfather dies, high school student Rintaro inherits a tiny secondhand bookshop and a talking cat named Tiger who needs his help. Together they embark on a series of fantastical adventures — each one a rescue mission to save books from people who mistreat them: the hoarder who never reads, the editor who butchers, the reader who refuses to be challenged. Natsukawa's fable is unabashedly sentimental about the power of books, but earns its sentiment through specificity — each villain represents a real way that reading gets diminished, and each rescue requires Rintaro to articulate what books actually mean to him. A book lover's fairy tale that's wise enough to know the real magic isn't in books themselves — it's in what they ask of us.
