The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Hard-boiled Stories from the Cat Bar

What's It About? 

An assassin unable to get over the loss of his cat, a man with a scar on his cheek, and a feline named Dandy that is waiting for its master to return are at the center of this gritty tale of men and tears.

Hard-boiled Stories from the Cat Bar is drawn and scripted by Yourei Ono and Yen Press released its first volume both digitally and in print for $6.99 and $15.00 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I am very mixed about Hard-boiled Stories from the Cat Bar. I freely admit that that's because there are few things that can crush my heart like losing a pet, whether personally or in fiction; I'm still not over having to read Where the Red Fern Grows in elementary school. That's something that's very much a part of this book, which features one character grieving the death of his twenty-year-old cat and one cat who loses two owners over the course of the volume. So if that's your button, this is unlikely to be the book for you.

That said, it's hard to resist parts of its premise: that somewhere deep in Tokyo there's a bar called Kitty & Me where grizzled yakuza and other disreputable types go to pet pretty kitties while they drink their booze and talk business. (Smoking is emphatically not allowed because it's bad for the cats.) The bar forms the backdrop for a twisted tale of police corruption, murder, and kitties, wherein a hitman who left one man alive at a crime scene three years ago (on purpose) is at the bar grieving the loss of his cat when the man he's been hired to kill stumbles in. This guy's a former cop who uncovered the corruption and inherited the care of Dandy, an enormous tuxedo cat, when the hitman killed his owner in the aforementioned incident. Dandy has been living at Kitty & Me, waiting for Daddy #2 to come for him…but sadly the man just fell off a building saving another cat, and his minutes are numbered. In his last moments of life, he and the hit man come up with a plan to expose the corrupt policemen while also finding Dandy a new home and the depressed hit man a new cat to love.

The story doesn't play out in chronological order, giving it a gritty cop drama feel. It can be a little confusing, but it does pay off in the end for the most part, although I do feel like at least one chapter could have been cut out to make the book tighter overall. Mostly the story's schtick is that we've got this very Sam Spade-style hardboiled crime story (in both text and art) going down in a seedy bar with images of cats every few panels – mostly Dandy making goofy faces or people being shocked by how heavy he is. It's a little bit awkward, but that's mostly because this really doesn't feel like the kind of story where you want to laugh every so often. It's kind of like Gangsta. with cat jokes.

Whatever I think of it, and I'm not sure I'll be able to fully formulate that for some time, I can say that this is very much its own special thing. So while I may not love it, it certainly gets full marks for originality; if that's what you're after, you'll definitely find it here.

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

While excellent art and the blueprints for a gritty crime story are there, Hard-boiled Stories from the Cat Bar ultimately suffers from being about a chapter and a half too long and focusing on pet-related melodrama to the point of absurdity. Have I cried over a lost or ailing pet? Yes. Would I allow a man to put a bullet in my head because I have no reason to live anymore? Probably not, and I'm not even a hitman.

The one-volume story tries to cover all the bases of a crime-mystery; a corrupt cop trying to kill a former colleague when he digs too deep into a politically-motivated hit; the hitman crossing him, a fake out to get an admission of guilt, and the groundwork for a deception that was months in the making. However, it's all just too much. The story hops across time to build the "what" of the mystery only to later flashback to the "why." It makes the timeline sometimes difficult to follow, but even though I feel comfortable saying I have a general grip on the sequence of events, some of those "whys" are...more silly than anything. The members of the bar try to play a game of psychological warfare against the corrupt cop only for a weak payoff that goes on too long.

The art is very nice in that detailed, yaoi-proportions kind of way. I didn't find the cats that cute; they're more Garfield-like in proportion and facial mannerisms. Their spot in the story is actually more diminished than I would have liked while their owners' fanaticism is overdone – and I say this as someone obsessed with my own cats. I came away from the story wishing I had an artbook of hot yakuza guys with cats but no real interest in recommending the story.