The narrator’s close friend dies from cancer, and the narrator worries about his own health as the Shōwa emperor grows ever weaker on his deathbed.

The narrator has just worked up the courage to quit his job as a literary editor in order to pursue his own writing projects, but he only has enough money to help his wife maintain the household for about a year and a half. The novel moves elliptically through several stories, gradually passing from point to point by way of meandering descriptions of the outside alley, the estate garden, and the narrator’s house in relation to the space and weather outside. Despite the protests of the woman living in the main house of the larger estate, who claims that the neighborhood cats ruin her garden and track dirt inside her house, the boy is allowed to keep the small white-mottled cat, which is promptly given the name Chibi, meaning “little one.” A cat wanders into the housewife’s garden, and her son becomes enamored with the creature. A young housewife and her son live in a house next door that shares the shade of an ancient zelkova tree with the narrator’s house. The narrator’s house faces a narrow side street that he calls “Lightning Alley” because of its sharp, zig-zagging turns. The Guest Cat is set in 1988 in a residential neighborhood not too far away from Shinjuku Station, where the young narrator lives with his wife in a rented house located on the property of an old estate. Publication Year: 2014 (America) 2001 (Japan)

The guest cat