When a Cat Faces West, Vol. 2 by Yuki Urushibara

 

When a Cat Faces West, Vol. 2 by Yuki Urushibara

My Rating: ★★★★

When a new flow takes effect, it’s time to call Hirota and Chima! While dealing with seemingly random cases of flow is Hirota’s life, Chima is ready to ditch it and return to her regular life as soon as she returns to normal. While Chima has yet to figure out the cause for flow making her a pre-teen again, she and Hirota deal with a drying rack floating around town, a steep set of stairs turning onto a hike, and a mysterious ghost in the fog.

So far, I’ve been really enjoying this series. It’s a slow burn, but I like that about it because it’s not like flow is going to be stopped all together, so it isn’t building up to a huge flow blow out. It’s very character driven, so we really get to know Chima and Hirota more and more in addition to seeing there’s a lot of depth to each of the characters affected by flow. Now that we’re in the second volume, we get to see more about this world and how everyone is dealing with flow.

There’s little details that really make the story realistic. In the first volume, we saw that people had to fill out flow paperwork so the government could deal with how cases of flow affected people. It initially pertained to things like housing and work, but now we see that it’s much more complex than that. For example, Chima has a flow ID to show that she’s 35-years-old and physically affected by flow. Then there’s a flow case in the story that’s a time warp all tied into a character’s failed relationship.

It’s also nice to see that the characters who are most experienced with flow don’t always recognize when something is flow or not. We’ve got the ghost on the bridge, who Hirota believes is actually a ghost when everyone else can see they’ve got another case on their hands. Then we have Chima, who hasn’t realized that her feelings are the cause of her own case. We get to see her suddenly jump to appearing in her twenties only for her to revert back once things like marriage get brought up. All in all, this was another great read. I’m looking forward to seeing how the story continues to develop!