Some kittens are cuter than others and the ugly ones, well, it takes a special person to love them. One such kitten had been at a pet store for so long that he was no longer a kitten but it seems now that Fukumaru may have found his forever home.
For as slow and silly as they often are, I’m usually a fan of slice-of-life-from-the-cat’s-point-of-view stories like Plum Crazy or the anime adaptation of My Roommate is a Cat. This is definitely because I’m a cat lover without a kitty myself and these stories feel like they are written by fellow cat lovers who are very familiar with the weird things cats do.
Umi Sakurai also feels like they are a cat lover but, as one of the bonus pages confirms, they also feel like a new writer who is struggling to keep the story from becoming repetitive. The chapters are short but the gags are even shorter — Fukumaru does something, Kanda (his human) is surprised, because he’s never had any kind of pet before, but this just ends up making Kanda love him even more. Rinse and repeat for every chapter and you have a story which, almost baffling, is going to be an ongoing series.
I think I would have been less bored by this story if it was a oneshot instead of an ongoing series; there are a few details about Kanda’s life that Sakurai is currently keeping veiled (we see Kanda living on his own but there are a few mentions of his children) and I think the story would have likely been more engaging if Sakurai had put all of the ideas they had for the story into one volume instead of (presumably) spreading them out over several volumes. Slice of life stories often have a consistent mood throughout but A Man and His Cat felt flat, not smooth, with a real lack of variety of situations, physical and emotional, that the characters go through. This volume was a quick read but it was also a dull one as well.
I am a bit biased however: I just don’t find Fukumaru cute at all (not even “ugly cute”) so it was a little bit hard to understand Kanda’s excitement at times. But I suspect that many cat lover manga readers will feel differently and delight in having another kitty iyashikei story (and Kanda is unusual for being an oji-sama and I’m sure to set many hearts a flutter with his polished looks). I however will go back to lobbying American manga publishers to bring over My Roommate is a Cat and wistfully staring at kitties on my local animal shelter’s website.