A Man & His Cat Volume 15

A battle-scarred exotic shorthaired cat wanders into Mr. Kanda’s garden – and when Fukumaru and his sister Marin spot him, they recognize him as their big brother! But no amount of desperate yowling and wailing from his siblings can persuade him to stay and he walks off. Fukumaru is determined to go after him and persuades Mr. Kanda to take him for a walk. Outside, he asks other dogs and cats they encounter if they can help but the only suggestion he gets is the advice to “ask the well-informed golden dog.” Just when Mr. Kanda is on the point of turning back, who should greet them but his friend Kobayashi, out walking his beloved shiba inu, Chako. And Chako has lovely golden fur… she’s ‘the well-informed golden dog’! Unfortunately, she also feels nothing but disdain for Fukumaru and refuses to answer his question. Fukumaru isn’t going to give up so easily, though, especially when it comes to matters concerning his family!

Chako eventually relents and deigns to tell Fukumaru that she spotted his brother in the grounds of the estate of Ryuzo Takamido, head of the Takamido Group. Fukumaru is fired up, eager to go there but Chako warns him off; it seems that her master Kobayashi is the son-in-law of the formidable Takamido and what’s more, his father-in-law “absolutely loathes my master.”

Undaunted, Fukumaru manages to sneak in when Kobayashi goes to the estate to give his father-in-law a cake on his birthday. Unfortunately, the unpopular son-in-law walks into the middle of a family row about succession amongst Takamido’s ambitious sons. Things are going from bad to worse when Fukumaru is spotted – and tries to make a run for it into the garden. Are all his attempts to trace his big brother doomed to end in failure?

Another volume in A Man & His Cat is always a welcome arrival and this one, the fifteenth, is very cat-centric indeed! Mostly told from Fukumaru’s point of view, it’s full of cat-speak and dog-speak (with a little growling) too, cleverly rendered into English by translator Taylor Engel. However, if you were hoping for more on the music side of the story, these chapters concentrate on the pets. To be honest, I’d like to read more about the group Kanda’s son Hoshinari is attempting to put together as that looked like a really promising storyline. Adorable as the antics of Fukumaru can be, the events in this volume are a little difficult to swallow (Fukumaru just tagging along with Kobayashi to the Takamido estate doesn’t quite work for me). The interactions at the vet’s are spot-on, though and add an authentic feel to the end of the volume.

Lettering is by Lys Blakeslee and, as before, brings all the different pets’ voices to life on the page. There are colour pages at the beginning (four) and end of the book (two) and the usual 4-koma pages between chapters, as well as an amusing comic-style Afterword from Umi Sakurai about the cover art and a sneak peek of Volume 16; no dates yet for the Square Enix Manga edition where #16 is already out and #17 is due out in June.

Read a free preview at the publisher’s website here.

Our review copy from Square Enix Manga was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).