‘A Game of Cat and Killer’ by Jiro Akagawa

Published by MacLehose Press,
24 September 2026.
ISBN: ‏978-152945187-0 
Translated from the Japanese
by Haydn Trowell

A Game of Cat and Killer is the first of Jiro Akagawa’s three quirky crime fiction novels known as the Casebooks of Mikeneko Holmes. Characterized by author A.J. Finn as “think Agatha Christie with claws!”, the series features a Tokyo detective in present-day Japan assisted in his work by a cat. The feline sleuth is called Holmes, acknowledging indebtedness to the legendary Sherlock, while mikeneko literally means ‘three-fur cat’ in Japanese. Holmes is a calico, his coat including white, orange, and black or brown patches. 

As for the detective, Akagawa presents us with a flawed but lovable character in twenty-eight-year-old Yoshitaro Kitayama, a tall and lanky man notable for drowsiness rather than youthful vigor and a childishly sweet face that has earned him the nickname of “Princess” at the police station where he works. He is youthful beyond his years. Having lost their parents, he and his younger sister Harumi share an apartment. Despite his close bond with Harumi, Kitayama is abnormally shy around women. 

Kitayama first encounters Holmes when he is dispatched to investigate the case of Yumiko Kurihara, a third-year student at Hagoromo Women’s University found brutally murdered in her apartment near the campus. The prologue to the novel makes it clear Yumiko engaged in the occasional spot of sex work to fund such additional expenses as holidays. Her longing to visit Guam proves fatal. Yumiko is attacked so savagely by a male client she initially dismisses as boringly ordinary that, when her body is subsequently discovered in her bedroom by Hiroko, her flat mate cannot stop vomiting when she sees how Yumiko’s stomach has been sliced open, its guts spilling out, in a room awash with blood. 

Despite the graphic horror of the first murder in the novel, Akagawa maintains a lighthearted, even comical tone in this book. He amusingly describes, for example, the terror Kitayama experiences on realizing that his boss, Inspector Shigeru Mitamura, intends to dispatch him to a women’s university to investigate Yumiko’s death. He first interviews Tomoo Morisaki, dean of the faculty of letters at Hagoromo, who happens to have an attractive cat in his office named Holmes. Having interviewed Hiroko—who has told him about Yumiko’s method of supplementing her income through selling her body—Morisaki has already come up with the supposition that she might have been murdered by a client, and he urges Kitayama to look into the possibility that there is an individual masterminding a prostitution ring at the university. More murders follow in rapid succession, including one that takes place in a locked room. When Morisaki is killed, Kitayama adopts Holmes. It turns out Harumi has been leading a life her brother knows nothing about. Holmes exhibits a canny ability to detect and foil crime. 

This book is highly recommended for fans of cozy crime, cat lovers, and readers interested in that strange and wonderful country called Japan.
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra. 

Jiro Akagawa is one of Japan's most prolific and celebrated mystery writers. In a career that spans several decades, he has sold more than 330 million copies of his books, and won many prestigious awards including the Japan Mystery Literature Award and the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for Literature. Many of his books have been adapted for film and TV, including his beloved Mikeneko Holmes series, which recounts the adventures of a detective and his adopted cat. 

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction. novels.