The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

When a Cat Faces West

What's It About? 

Flow—the phenomenon that occurs when matter falls out of balance and changes form. Flow creates oddities big and small that can be disruptive or delightful in equal measure, and it's up to Flow Disposal departments and independent contractors to shepherd the Flow back to its natural form. For Chima Kondo, a 35-year-old woman stuck in the body of a 12-year-old thanks to the effects of Flow, understanding how Flow works and how to disperse it has become critical. But when she joins Flow Disposal contractors Hirota and Shacho of Hirota Flow Inc., she finds that there's more to Flow than she once knew, and plenty more to find out...

When a Cat Faces West has story and art by Yuki Urushibara and English translation by Mari Au. Kodansha Comics will release its first volume on May 17.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Sometimes you can tell what a creator's primary interests in a story are from how they present it, and other times they just straight-up tell you. According to Yuki Urushibara's notes after the first volume of When a Cat Faces West, her main motivation behind this series was in drawing 'modern day scenery'. She even mentions that it 'explains a few things', and does it ever. To be sure, that scenery is genuinely impressive throughout this book. It's all lovingly-detailed modern township locations, districts carried by their own personalities, then often twisted or spiced up when the supernatural 'Flow' phenomenon the story is built around comes into play. So you get a blooming cherry blossom tree or undeveloped stretch of forest teleporting in among the buildings, or in one extremely memorable instance, a district where the corners on every single object wind up rounded off. There's an explorative love of craft in showing all this off, and you could probably glean extra entertainment value just by going back through Urushibara's drawings multiple times for little details you'd missed.

Making your own fun like that might be required when reading When a Cat Faces West, as the lack of an engaging narrative with any real hooks in it is among those things explained by Urushibara's admitted priorities. It's a shame, because the sci-fi/supernatural concept of Flow is honestly a compelling starting place on its own. It's the kind of everyday world-bending weirdness you could effectively center a workplace story around, as a means to dive into the more exploratory elements of that. But Urushibara often seems as flippant about the foibles powering Flow as lead character Hirota does. Half the time his 'solution' to the phenomenon is simply to wait for it to go back to normal (even when a whole apartment building full of people disappears), or his advice to get someone to resolve their emotional issues behind the Flow is some extremely basic placating platitudes. There's little interest in the kinds of long-term trauma response or self-healing resolutions that Flow could work as symbolism for, and instead pages are simply passed by drawing the effects on that admittedly-neat scenery.

As well, the other half of our mystery-solving duo, Chima, suffers from her own brand of deprioritization in her own story. To start, part of her bit is supposed to be that she's a 35-year-old office worker aged down into a 12-year-old body by Flow phenomenon, and perhaps I've just been desensitized by too much Doga Kobo anime like New Game! or My Senpai Is Annoying, but I absolutely didn't clock this in her character design until the reveal. I thought she was just short! It doesn't help how little her appearance goes unremarked on by anyone else in the story, even though not being taken seriously by colleagues is supposed to be a key component of issues in her backstory. But the writing can't seem to muster much interest for her in general, even in the introductory chapter where her initial interaction with Hirota is supposed to be a 'job interview' that proves her abilities, but she mostly just acts as a sounding board for his exposition and feels like a nonentity otherwise. The most emotional effort When a Cat Faces West can muster is actually in one chapter partway through where the titular cat goes missing.

If a focus on nifty scenery strung together with a basic, only occasionally notable story sounds appealing, When a Cat Faces West might work for you. But if you desire any kind of conceptual or characteristic communication, it's going to come up short.

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Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

When a Cat Faces West is a pleasant, low-key slice of life story with supernatural elements. Chima works with her boss Hirota at a tiny hole-in-the-wall agency dedicated to repairing “Flow”, a quantum phenomenon where matter and reality slide and shift. As it happens, cats enjoy Flow, hence Shacho, the mustachioed mascot of the series. Yuki Urushibara refers to this book as being “about modern-day scenery”; indeed, they excel at the liminal nature of alleyways dotted with signposts or the uncanny reflections of reflections within mirrors. You'll come to appreciate how bizarre the world is when all of the corners and edges have been rounded off because of a lover's spat. Character development is sparce: this series is more about the wonders of the Flows encountered by Chima and Hirota. Although Chima herself is affected by Flow in a manner that curiously ties into the mystery at hand, little else is learned of the protagonists. They nevertheless manage to feel like old friends as you read their misadventures.

Urushibara's art perfectly captures both the cozy mundaneness of the Flow Repair shop as well as the uncanny nature of Flow-affected rooms and roads. The tone and setting is comfortable and sedate, and while the unhurried pace and matter-of-fact tone might be a bit dry for some readers, When a Cat Faces West seems to be a good fit for those seeking something to scratch that Mushi-shi or Mononoke itch.

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Rebecca Silverman

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Not all science fiction needs to be epic. When a Cat Faces West represents the calmer side of what the genre can offer, introducing us to a version of the world where excess matter can coalesce into something called “flow.” Get too much flow built up and you'll see a disruption or a distortion of the world, whether that's caused by the memory of the land, human anxieties, or something else entirely. It's a neat concept and there's so much variation on display that no two chapters feel alike, creating a quiet but fascinating world that asks as many questions as it answers.

One of those is how cats fit into the whole thing. There's no shortage of myths about cats and their supernatural abilities – one I heard says that if a cat is staring at nothing and you look between their ears, you can see the ghost they're actually staring at – and those are backed up by real feline feats, such as how my mother's cat alerted us to her sleep apnea. Both combine in Shacho, the resident cat of the story. Shacho works with Hirota at his Flow Correction Agency, and his reaction to it not only helps Hirota and new hire Chima to figure out where a problem is, but also how large the problem might be. Between Shacho and Hirota they have a pretty impressive track record of resolving flow issues, and it's interesting to see how each case differs from the ones before or after it while still leaving us plenty of things to wonder about. Hirota's not right one hundred percent of the time, suggesting that not even he really understands what's going on; for instance, he has no firm answers for Chima when she walked through a patch of flow and emerged looking like she's twelve years old again.

Whether or not there's a spiritual component is also up in the air, and that allows for a bit of science fiction versus fantasy tension in the story, especially when the Fudo Shrine, which has been handling flow issues spiritually for eight hundred years, comes into the story. That's only in the final chapter of the book, but there are enough similarities between their approach and Hirota's that we really have to wonder where the line is drawn between method and belief, especially since the shrine also has a cat to help them out. All of it is lavishly illustrated with detailed artwork that spends most of its effort on the backgrounds rather than the characters, an interesting trait that we also saw in the creator's previous title to be released in English, Mushi-shi. All in all this is fascinating, and if it can be a little oblique or slow at times, it's worth reading nevertheless.

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MrAJCosplay

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Born from the creative mind that brought us Mushi-shi, When a Cat Faces West has some pretty big shoes to fill. Yuki Urushibara's previous work was a cult classic that dealt with rather heavy and existential subject matters through incredibly subdued yet profound tales of the supernatural, and his latest book seems to carry on that same tradition with a slightly different coat of paint. In an alternate reality, supernatural occurrences called "flows" are relatively commonplace to the point where there are specific service workers hired to handle them. Each chapter covers a different "flow" phenomenon, and while some of them can be incredibly existential and unsettling, ranging from being turned into a child to portals opening up to various different mirror dimensions, others are simple to the point where at first glance, you'd think they wouldn't be problems at all. But that's just it: the world is always in a very delicate state, so even something as simple as turning pointed corners into rounded ones could have various different negative effects on those around us; in fact, the overall laid-back and quiet nature of the manga can sometimes clash with the severity of those implications. Similar to Mushi-shi, When a Cat Faces West might be more of an acquired taste, but if you're in the mood for some supernatural existentialism, then this might be a nice book to read on a quiet afternoon.