We’ll Prescribe a Cat by Syou Ishida

We’ll Prescribe a Cat by Syou Ishida

There are books that arrive with an elaborate theory of life, and there are books that make their argument almost imperceptibly. We’ll Prescribe a Cat, by Syou Ishida, belongs to the second category. Its premise sounds like a literary joke — a clinic that prescribes cats instead of medicine — yet Ishida gradually turns this whimsical idea into something considerably more serious: a meditation on loneliness, regret, work, grief and the strange, often underestimated ways in which another living creature can alter the shape of a life.

For our readers at Les Epicuriens, this is precisely the kind of discovery that makes a bookclub worthwhile.

The novel, which received the Prix des lecteurs de la Ville de Lausanne in 2025 and was recommended by the staff of the Payot Lausanne library, takes us to Kyoto, where an elusive establishment known as the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can be found at the end of a cobbled alley, on the top floor of an old building. The clinic is not visible to everyone. Its patients are people carrying a particular kind of emotional burden, and its treatment is as peculiar as it is deceptively simple: they are prescribed cats.

The conceit could easily have produced a sentimental book. Ishida instead uses it as a framework for a series of quietly observed encounters between people estranged from some part of themselves and animals that, naturally, have no interest in their professional status, social anxieties, or carefully constructed identities.

Bee, an eight-year-old mixed-breed cat, enters the life of a discouraged businessperson and unexpectedly reconnects him with the pleasures of physical work. Margot, an imposing cat with the physique of a lightweight boxer, accompanies a middle-aged call-centre employee confronting the fear of becoming professionally and personally irrelevant. Koyuki, an elegant white cat, brings a young mother back to a painful memory of a kitten she was once forced to abandon.

Elsewhere, Tank and Tangerine accompany a handbag designer whose hardness towards the world conceals a similar hardness towards herself. Mimita, a Scottish Fold kitten, becomes the unlikely companion of a geisha still carrying guilt over a cat she lost years earlier.

The structure is episodic, but the stories gradually begin to speak to one another. Each character is trapped, in one way or another, inside a narrative they have constructed about themselves: I have failed; I am no longer useful; I should have done something differently; I do not deserve forgiveness. The cats do not argue against these convictions. They simply make them harder to maintain.

This is one of Ishida's most appealing literary decisions. The cats are not magical therapists disguised as animals. They remain cats. They sleep, demand attention, create inconvenience and refuse to behave according to the emotional needs of their owners. Their very indifference is part of the cure.

There is an almost radical modesty to the novel's understanding of healing.

Ishida is not particularly interested in grand revelations. There is no promise that suffering can be erased, nor that one transformative encounter will suddenly put a damaged life back into perfect order. Instead, change takes place through repetition: feeding an animal, walking with it, making space for it, noticing its habits. The ordinary becomes therapeutic.

This gives the novel a quality that may seem slight at first but becomes increasingly persuasive. Ishida understands that many forms of unhappiness are sustained by the relentless inwardness of modern life. We think about ourselves, our careers, our failures, our relationships, our regrets. The cat interrupts this closed circuit. It requires attention to something outside oneself.

The book is therefore less interested in cats than its title might suggest. Its real subject is connection — and the possibility that connection can begin without conversation.

There is also something particularly effective in the Kyoto setting. Ishida's world is recognisably contemporary, populated by workplaces, financial pressures and social expectations, yet the mysterious clinic introduces an almost folkloric dimension. The supernatural never overwhelms the everyday. Instead, it sits quietly beside it, as though magic were simply another name for those inexplicable encounters that occasionally change us.

Readers who enjoyed The Travelling Cat Chronicles, The Cat Who Saved Books or She and Her Cat will recognise the emotional territory. But Ishida's achievement lies less in inventing an entirely new idea than in understanding how much can be done with a simple one.

The novel is accessible and relatively short, and its structure makes it an inviting bookclub choice. Yet its simplicity should not be mistaken for shallowness. Like the cats at the centre of the story, the novel does not demand that we take it too seriously. It simply stays with us.

And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about We’ll Prescribe a Cat: it proposes that healing may not always arrive as an answer. Sometimes it arrives as a presence.

A creature that needs feeding.

A creature that disrupts your routine.

A creature that sits beside you without asking you to explain yourself.

At Les Epicuriens, we like books that leave the door open for conversation, and Ishida gives us plenty to discuss. This is a novel you can read in an afternoon, but it invites us to linger much longer.

The Les Epicuriens Bookclub Conversation

How do the cats change the way their human companions understand themselves—and why might an animal succeed where another person or conventional advice cannot?

Ishida presents healing through small gestures rather than dramatic transformation. Does the novel convince us that ordinary companionship and acts of care can genuinely change the way we experience our lives?

We look forward to hearing which story — and, inevitably, which cat — stayed with you the longest.