Reading Record 9

 Welp.  It's taken waaaaay too long to get through this book.

(I blame Nintendo.  I recently got a Switch 2 on the bundle that comes with a download of one of three games, and since I've been thinking that I ought to try playing a Pokemon game now that I've played a couple of Digimon games, I figured "why not?" and got Pokopia.  And it is stupidly addictive, to the point that it's been cutting into my reading time...)

Anyway.

The book I just read is The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post, volume one, by Lv Ye Qian He.

I had initially decided to pass on this book when I saw the description on the Seven Seas Danmei website.  The way the website described it was sort of a "wink wink nudge nudge" as if the reader wasn't supposed to be sure that the reborn protagonist's new teacher was actually his precious kitten, having cultivated a human form over the three hundred years the protagonist was dead.

To my delight, that is not the case.  The book is super-direct about that, from even before his human form makes his first appearance.  Even better, though, are the cat-like traits that said character displays.

There is a convention of describing some people as being cat-like in this genre.  For example, Chu Wanning, the love interest in The Husky and his White Cat Shizun, is described as being cat-like.  (Heck, it's right there in the title, even!)  But what are those "cat-like" traits?  He's aloof and a bit of a tsundere.  That's it.

I mean, okay, yeah, cats are frequently aloof.  And their tendency to be distant even with the humans they care about can seem like tsundere behavior.  But that is only a tiny fraction of what cats are like.  It's the perception of cats held only by people who have never actually lived with a cat.

That is not the case here.  Qingtong, the white cat of this novel, actually does behave like a cat, even as a human.  Yes, he is certainly aloof and somewhat of a tsundere about the protagonist, but he also feels the urge to chase after glass beads rolling across the floor, and at one point, after someone brought him a bunch of rare elixirs, he set them all up on a table, saw that none of them were what he wanted, and knocked them all off the table.  As someone who used to have a two-cat household, his genuinely feline behavior keeps making me giggle fondly.

So, yeah, first volume was excellent (despite how long it took me to read it) and I was a fool to have passed it up earlier.  Admittedly, these things can always turn on you later on, but...the "about the author" blurb at the back says that the author specializes in "cute and feel-good" stories, so I'm hopeful that it will remain as warm and enjoyable as it has so far.  I bought the first two volumes together, so I'll be going straight to volume two from here...

Original language:  Chinese