When I was traveling a few years back, I had seen a Japanese movie ‘If cats disappeared from the world’ in the plane. It was such a beautiful and touching story. I couldn’t let it go and I tried to find the movie, but I could not. One day I saw a book with the same title in a bookstore. There it was. The story that was so beautiful. The story that I couldn’t let go. The story that became part of me.
The book is written by Genki Kawamura. The story is about a young man who gets an unexpected diagnosis from the doctor that he has only a short time to live. Before he can think of his bucket list, the devil appears in front of him. He offers him something special: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he gets an extra day to live.
So what would you do? What things would you make disappear? I think I would like to remove all the bad things in life. But even that may not be a good idea as everything has to be in balance in life. There is no good without bad. There is no day without a night. There is no positivity without negativity. So that’s a difficult question. How can you decide what is worth enough for one extra day of life for one person?
I really enjoyed reading the book. Even when it was a sad story, there were moments that made me smile and moments that made me cry. And about that last thing, there are not many books that I read that make me cry. You can really feel the story. It’s about loss and also about discovering what really matters in modern life. Read the book ‘If cats disappeared from the world’ if you want to experience this story by yourself.
Jane Regina Sauer 