Junji Ito is slowly becoming a big name within the anime community. While he’s not a household name quite yet, the recent anime adaptation of his short stories and the viral nature of The Enigma of Amigara Vault have done much to spread the man’s name around. And if you dabbled a bit in his works, read a few of those short stories, then perhaps it’s time that you also read Junji Ito’s Cat Diary.
While the Junji Ito Collection anime left me very disappointed, it was the final push that I needed to check out this single-volume manga. It felt wrong to just shove it into a Quick Manga Reviews selection, so this seemed the perfect time to bring it up.
Junji Ito’s Cat Diary is an autobiographical manga starring thinly-veiled, fictional versions of Ito and his wife. The two of them have just moved into a new house where Ito comes to greatly enjoy how new and clean it all feels. That is, until his wife coerces him into letting her bring in a cat… and then another. The household is joined by the eerie-looking Yon and the Norwegian forest cat Muu. From there the story turns into a series of anecdotes about Ito learning to live together with these cats after never having owned one before.
What makes this particularly hilarious is that Ito’s style hasn’t changed to better fit such an innocent, funny story. A Chapter might be about Ito getting jealous about the cats only wanting to play with his wife, but the manga expresses that with the deranged expressions and inhuman poses that are more suitable to Ito’s horror works. And while the cats aren’t monstrous, they are given a hyper-realistic look and eerie expressions. Yon even has a skull pattern on his back that instills fear and Ito sometimes likens him to monsters seen in some of his works.
It’s amazing to see how the manga can still have these horror influences, liken these cats to frightening abominations, yet still tell sweet and relatable stories with them. One chapter in particular was just a short bit that mocked how dumb Yon looks when he falls asleep. With that said, you do need to have an appreciation for the author’s works to get the appeal of this manga. The cat stories themselves are fun, but many of them are the kind of tales any cat owner could tell you. It’s the style that makes it uniquely fun, but it can easily seem strange and nonsensical if you haven’t read the works that it references and parodies.
So yes, if you are a fan of Junji Ito, you really should take the time to check out Junji Ito’s Cat Diary. It’s only 1 volume counting 10 brief chapters, so it’s a short read. It also comes with little Q&A bits if you were interested in learning more about the man and how he manages to create such bizarre tales.
Junji Ito’s Cat Diary is hilarious! I love how he uses the same art style and intensity from his horror works to tell heartwarming stories about his cats!
This is actually the only Junji Ito manga I’ve ever read. I had, of course, heard of him and had seen panels and snippets of his horror manga online before I read Cat Diary, so I was aware of what his usual style looked like and I could appreciate the humor without being directly familiar with his other works. I’m sure it’s even funnier if you have read his other manga though.
I am surprised (and happy) to hear it even holds up for those who haven’t read many of his works. I actually wanted to see if you had a review on this before I published mine, but the search term “cat” only turned up the Komi-san manga.
I think I will do a review of this one at some point. After reading your review I pulled the manga off my bookshelf and started skimming through it again and had a good laugh.