The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

Cat + Gamer

What's It About? 

Meet Riko, a twenty-nine-year-old office worker with an obsession with video games. Her coworkers can't quite figure her out—she never talks about her personal life, she never works overtime, and she never joins them for happy hour. Is she antisocial? Nope, she's rushing home to play video games alone. That is until a stray cat is found in the office parking lot and ends up coming home with her! Having no experience with pets, Riko uses lessons drawn from video games to guide her in cat care, while her cute companion tries to understand her behavior through a cat's worldview.

Cat + Gamer has story and art by Wataru Nadatani and English translation by Zack Davisson. Dark Horse will release its first volume both digitally and physically on May 11.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Do you enjoy A Man and His Cat but wish that it didn't drive you to tears every time? Then Dark Horse has the answer for you with this manga about feline ownership! Just as rooted in the realities of sharing your space with a cat, Cat + Gamer takes a much lighter approach than A Man and His Cat, and also a less twee one than titles like Chi's Sweet Home; simply put, it's a much more middle-of-the-road look at what it means to suddenly coexist with a kitten.

Riko Kozakura's probably the last person who ever thought she'd get a pet of any variety, mostly because she's so very, very dedicated to her myriad video games that taking care of another living being doesn't seem like something she'd be all that keen on doing. Therefore she's probably the most surprised when her office's security guard comes around with a stray kitten and she offers to take the little furball home. She's absolutely a novice at all things not related to her games – about all she knows to do is go to a pet store to ask what she needs. While this could have gone downhill quickly, instead she quickly finds herself charmed by her kitten as he does normal kitten things like eat, sleep, and play. Her delight and surprise is both infectious and very familiar, and I'm not just saying that because my youngest cat Ellery is a little tuxedo boy like Riko's Musubi.

Because this is so reliant on Musubi just doing normal kitten things, it's important that he's drawn both cutely and realistically, and fortunately the art is up for that. Kittens can contort themselves into totally bizarre positions, and Wataru Nadatani is good at showing that without ever veering into cartoony territory. Musubi does narrate the little bonus pages, but otherwise he's a very normal cat just existing in his home, which makes for a fun juxtaposition between Riko's delighted shock and the reader's knowledge of cats, because even if you've never had a cat, you probably still know more than she does about them!

The story's lighthearted approach to things like trying to figure out what sex Musubi is (Riko imposing human gender norms on him is pretty great) and realizing that he may have fleas really help keep the plot moving, and while Riko's constant need to contextualize everything in terms of an RPG can get annoying, it does give the book a different angle to approach cat cohabitation with. Basically if you like cats and/or live with one, this is a real treat, and if Riko can be irritating at times, that's okay – because we all know who the real star of the show is.