Exploring Japanese literature has been a thing for me this year, and We Will Prescribe You a Cat is the latest in my explorations. It’s easily the strangest of the Japanese literature I’ve read this year, with an increasing level of surrealness that continues until the collection’s end. In structure, it reminds me very much of What You are Looking For is in the Library, as we begin with a series of short stories about people who have find themselves in a troubled time of life visiting a place they’ve been told might have answers — a clinic for the soul. Upon arrival, they are given…a cat. And a prescription for how to deal with said cat — feeding direction, notes about behavior. That’s all. Invariably the cats have some effect on their hosts: one man who hates his job but won’t admit it is sacked after the cat makes him late; another man who felt isolated at home, ignored and considered irrelevant by his family, finds in the cat a way to mix things up and come together again. As with What You are Looking For, as the book progresses we see characters in one story becoming part of another’s, but — there’s increasing surreality, too, as characters encounter The Doctor and The Nurse outside the clinic, only they don’t act like themselves, and they have no idea why people are confusing them for other persons. The clinic, too, is a mystery: sometimes there, sometimes not. It gets progressively weirder. I enjoyed this collection well enough, though the stories didn’t overwhelm me the way What You Are Looking For or Before the Coffee Gets Cold did. Serious cat people may enjoy it more than I did: I like cats but am definitely on the doggo side of the line.