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The Cat in the Coffin

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By James Hadfield

When she named her 1978 debut "Chiteki Akujo no Susume," Mariko Koike didn’t realize what she was letting herself in for. The essay collection, whose title translates roughly as “Recommendations for Intellectual She-Devils,” was a calculated bit of sensationalism. All the same, its success far outstripped Koike’s expectations, transforming her into a celebrity—the new “bad girl” of the literary scene. The next few years saw her caught in a whirl of TV appearances and interviews, most of which played up her enfant terrible image (“The She-Devil Speaks,” read one typical headline).

Eventually, Koike decided that she’d had enough. As she described it in a 2006 interview, “I wasn’t a writer, I was a tarento.” At the age of 31, she made a conscious decision to step out of the spotlight altogether, and has all but completely spurned media appearances ever since.

During the early years of her self-imposed exile, Koike made a name for herself as an author of psychological thrillers, inspired by the works of Ruth Rendell and Catherine Arley. However, she later moved into romantic fiction, the genre with which she remains most closely associated today. The decision paid off: she would pick up the coveted Naoki Prize in 1995 for "Koi" (Love), a book that she later described as “the first novel I’d written with which I was totally satisfied.”

English-speaking readers will have to wait for that one for the time being. "The Cat in the Coffin" is Koike’s first book to appear in English translation, and predates Love by a few years. It could perhaps be seen as a transitional work—straddling, as it does, the divide between the mystery and romance genres.

In a brief prologue, Masayo Haryu, an aging artist crippled by rheumatism, is moved by the arrival of a stray cat to tell her housekeeper about an experience during her youth that would tragically alter the course of her life. This story occupies the remainder of the book. In it, the young Masayo travels from her home in Hokkaido to become the live-in tutor for the daughter of Goro Kawakubo, the widowed son of a famous artist. Eight-year-old Momoko is a precocious and aloof child who devotes most of her attention to Lala, a white cat that never seems to leave her side. “It was as if Earth and all its inhabitants had been destroyed, and it was the sad fate of the two of them, the little girl and her cat, to be the only beings left alive in the world,” she recounts in one of the book’s more florid passages.

As Masayo slowly befriends her ward, she also finds herself falling for the charms of the dashing, carefree Goro. But when he starts to date another woman—the dazzlingly attractive and feline-averse Chinatsu—disaster looms.

This isn’t a challenging read; you could easily get through the whole thing in one sitting. Still, it would be time well spent. Koike is an adept storyteller, and "The Cat in the Coffin" is richly descriptive and well paced, constantly tantalizing the reader with glimpses of facts whose full import only later becomes apparent. Cat lovers and she-devils in search of a good bit of beach reading could do far worse than this.

This review originally appeared in Metropolis magazine (www.metropolis.co.jp).

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I have bought this book...when finished...I let you know my reviews...:}

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