Classical Cats (Hardcover)

Brush-and-ink drawings of cats playing classical music by Mitsuhiro Amada, himself a cellist, are accompanied with poems and prose from the Japanese literary canon. Haiku by Basho, Issa and Buson, tanka by Onono Komachi and Ryokan, and thoughts from Kenko Hoshi's Tsurezuregusa make a surprising match with the playful and endearing cat musicians. The paintings and texts are ordered so as to suggest our journey through life: friendship, love, parting, and thoughts of another world...... But there is nothing solemn about the book and its delightful cats - not even in the last painting of group meditation in which only one of the participants seems wholly free from doubt! This is a book for all cat lovers, and it presents a world in which European and Japanese culture are subtly and happily merged.