To put it simply Chi’s Sweet Home by Konami Konata is a manga about a cat, to put it less simply Chi’s Sweet Home is a manga about a cat, more specifically an American Shorthair kitten, who ends up losing her mother whilst on a walk and is hence found by the Yamada family who after trying to find her a new home end up adopting Chi themselves, problem being though that they live in a no pets apartment building.
Well from here it episodically follows Chi adapting to her new life with the Yamadas and her various misadventures. And that’s pretty much all I can really say about the plot of Chi’s Sweet Home or really the lack thereof. You find in general pop culture that animals are for the most part personified acting and thinking like humans, however Chi’s Sweet Home is unique in that it bucks that trend due to Chi being plainly a cat which thinks like a young kitten, or how you would guess a kitten would think, and does all the stupid things that young kittens do. It is from here that the majority of the comedy of the book is derived from.
The artwork and character designs are simple, which goes well with the story, and very very cute! The cuteness factor is without a doubt Chi’s main weapon in her arsenal and reason for the book’s success. In manga and anime when a creator aims to make a character cute he/she often overshoots the mark making a sickly sweet, somewhat vomit inducing experience. However Konata hits it square on its jaw combining cute character designs with the natural cuteness that comes with a young kitten in a one-two knockout punch.
The actual book that Vertical put out really is a thing of beauty, the paper quality is above any of the books I’ve ever owned let alone any manga. It just is a pleasure to hold in your hands. In addition the entire book is unusually in full colour something that actually wasn’t done by Vertical themselves surprisingly enough but rather when it was first published in tankoban in Japan.
Throughout this I’ve been reviewing Chi’s Sweet Home as a book for adults as technically it is and was first published in a Seinen magazine, but it also functions perfectly as a children’s book and on first impressions you would say that it was one. It’s child friendliness is increased furthermore due to the fact that in Vertical’s attempts to reach out to a wider audience they have flipped the book so that it reads from left to right, because if as that wise 4Kids exec once said, children don’t read, what chance in hell do we have of getting them to read backwards?!?
This is a book pretty much perfect for cat lovers, but it really stands as just a nice thing to read that’s pretty much guaranteed to bring a smile to your face as you are continuously bombarded by weapons grade fluffy cuteness. If you have any doubts at all about whether to indeed pick up Chi’s Sweet Home I would have to recommend at least giving the Madhouse animated anime a chance which you can watch for free on Crunchyroll.
