| Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu | |
 Volume cover | |
| 伊藤潤二の猫日記 よん&むー (Itō Junji no Neko Nikki: Yon & Mū) | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Autobiographical |
| Manga | |
| Written by | Junji Ito |
| Published by | Kodansha |
| English publisher | |
| Magazine | Monthly Magazine Z |
| Original run | 26 November 2007 –26 December 2008 |
| Volumes | 1 |
Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu (Japanese:伊藤潤二の猫日記 よん&むー,Hepburn:Itō Junji no Neko Nikki: Yon & Mū) is anautobiographicalmanga written and illustrated byJunji Ito. Appearing as aserial inKodansha'sseinenmanga magazineMonthly Magazine Z from November 2007 to December 2008, it follows the adventures of J-kun, a horrormanga artist as he adjusts to life with cats: Yon, whom his fiancėe brings along to their new house, and Mu, aNorwegian Forest cat whom the couple adopts as a kitten.Junji Ito's Cat Diary draws on autobiographical elements of Ito's personal experience with cats. Publisher Kodansha compiled the ten installments of the manga into abound volume and released it in March 2009.
Kodansha Comics USA published an English-language translation ofJunji Ito's Cat Diary in October 2015, which also included the contributions of Ito and his wife to the 2011 collectionTeach Me, Michael! A Textbook in Support of Feline Disaster Victims. Upon publication, the manga received a favorable critical and commercial response, debuting inThe New York Times's weekly list of the ten best-selling manga volumes. It received generally positive reviews from critics, who enjoyed it as a cat-centered manga whose humor was derived from the emphasis on the behavior of the cat caretaker, rather than the cat. Critical discussions have centered around Ito's use of realism and exaggerated horror to elicit moments of comedy, the manga's relationship to previous works by Ito, and how the artwork depicts the relationship between cats and their caregivers.
Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu is an autobiographical manga that draws on manga artistJunji Ito's personal experience with cats.[1] It features various anecdotes about living with cats, which center on J-kun, a horrormanga artist (Ito's stand-in); his fiancée, A-ko (his wife Ayako Ishiguro's stand-in); her family cat, Yon ("Four"); and aNorwegian Forest cat, Mu ("Six").[2]
Ito used two main artistic styles throughout the manga: a realistic one and a horror-tinged one of exaggeration.[4][5] Joe McCulluch ofThe Comics Journal wrote that Ito's transitions between these two styles provided the foundational humor of the manga, in that Ito punctuates scenes of realistically drawn domesticity with exaggerated moments of stylized horror. For example, one scene in which J-kun attempts to play with the cats starts within Ito's realistic style, only to have J-kun quickly devolve visually into a monster as he becomes more upset that the cats respond to his wife's attempts at playing with them but not his; his features become exaggerated and horrific, while the cats, however, lose their sense of motion and activity from earlier and become "stiffly realistic" at his failed attempts to play with them.[3]Anime News Network's Rebecca Silverman wrote that Ito's realistic art worked to make the cats endearing, while the moments of horrific art served as comedy.[5]
Austin Price, another writer forThe Comics Journal, remarked thatJunji Ito's Cat Diary incorporates the "conceits and styles" of his earlier manga, such as narrative tone andbody horror, to act as a parody of them. According to Price, only the everyday narrative ofJunji Ito's Cat Diary delineated it from Ito's earlier works, which suggested to him that a degree of authorial humor was present in Ito's works; Price raised the possibility that "Ito’s work was itself a kind of grand joke."[6]
Other critics focused on the art's relationship to depictions of pet caretaking. Josiah Stoup ofOtaku USA suggested that Ito's art caricatured "the intense emotions that a pet owner feels," with both the cats and J-kun alternatively being frightened by the other. Stroup interpreted J-kun's periodically monstrous form as how his overwhelming affection appeared sometimes to the cats.[4] Silverman wrote that A-ko's terrifying appearance reflected her love for her cats, in that she appeared "as creepy as many of us cat owners fear we do."[5] A-ko's appearance, with her almost entirely white eyes, has also been noted to share similarities withyokai, supernatural Japanese entities.[3]
Best known for his horror mangaTomie,Lovesick Dead,Uzumaki, andSouichi,[7] Ito was approached by his editor to write a manga about cats, after the editor correctly deduced that Ito had recently acquired a cat through a change in his artwork. Previously, Ito had drawn cats as frightening but had recently drawn a "very cute" cat in a way that appeared to capture the "essence" of cats, thus convincing the editor.[1] Ito used the opportunity to draw on his anecdotes of living with the cats,[1] and his wife advised him on the manga'sstoryboards and depicting the personalities of the cats. Ito's sister asked that her own longhair cat, Ran-chan, be included in the manga, but he did not have the space for it.[8] His wife was generally fine with her depiction in the manga, but disliked that Ito drew her stand-in with very small pupils and striped pants.[9]
Junji Ito's Cat Diary appeared as an intermittentserial inKodansha'sseinenmanga magazineMonthly Magazine Z from 26 November 2007[10] to 26 December 2008.[11] Kodansha collected the ten installments into abound volume and published it on 13 March 2009.[12]Kodansha USA announced that it had obtained the manga's license at the 2015Anime Boston convention,[13] and published the English-language translation in North America on 27 October 2015.[14] The English-language edition also included the pieces contributed by Ito and his wife forTeach Me, Michael! A Textbook in Support of Feline Disaster Victims (2011), a book which was intended to raise support for cat shelters after theGreat Tohoku Earthquake. Their contributions consist of Ito's comic, "Yon Went to Heaven," and his wife's letter chronicling the death of Yon from heart failure on 3 February 2011, about a month before the earthquake, and their subsequent grieving.[15]Junji Ito's Cat Diary has also been translated into French byTonkam[16] and Italian byPanini Comics.[17]
Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu was favorably received by English-language readers, charting in the fourth spot onThe New York Times's weekly list of the ten best-selling manga volumes upon publication.[18] In general, the manga was also positively received by critics. Reviewers enjoyed the narrative as a lighthearted window into pet caretaking, where the humor derived from the caretaker's response to the cats, rather than the cats' behavior.[4][16][19] Children's librarian Marissa Lieberman wrote that, because of the overlap in the importance of narrative pacing and timing in both comedy and horror, Ito's previous work in horror and gag manga helped to makeJunji Ito's Cat Diary unique among other cat-centered manga.[20] Ito's two styles of artwork were generally seen as complementing the narrative nicely,[4][5] with highlights being the characters of Mu and Yon,[5] the range of character facial expressions,[16] and the timing and content of the gags.[21] The perceived potential audience for the manga was a point of discussion within the reviews, with several critics writing that the manga would appeal mainly to cat caretakers and fans of the author.[5][16][19] Faustine Lillaz ofPlanete BD, in contrast, wrote that the humor of the manga would have a wide appeal.[21]
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