What an odd little novel. Yes, it definitely had vibes of Ove, as it is currently being marketed, but it wasn't nearly as charming or endearing. I would call this novel a very realistic and somewhat depressing Ove. As our main character, Mr. Katō, goes through his experiences and has personal reflections, a lot of things in his life DON'T change and it left me feeling sad for him and his wife. I do think this would make a good book club novel, as there are many different things to discuss very organically.

Sadly this was underwhelming. I was expecting more of a transformation for our grumpy MC but it felt a little flat.

An oblivious, grumpy male retiree takes on a job as an actor playing family members or social contacts for clients in need. The circumstances are odd, yet the man finds meaning in them that has repercussions on his own relationships. While the premise sounded fun, the reading wasn't particularly so.

This didn't quite work for me, and it probably won't for others. It's not bad. It was missing something, and doesn't have the charm of, say, the Ove novel.

Thanks very much for the free copy for review!!

The publisher got me with comparing Mr. Kato Plays Family to Man Called Ove. Aside from a curmudgeon of a main character, I did not feel much similarity, which I am starting to assume is the case for nearly every popular read that is used for a comparison for a new book. That said, I found Mr. Kato to be an interesting character and his story, while not gripping, was an interesting study in the dramatic, post-retirement changes to one’s existence.

Recently retired and close to estranged from his wife, Mr. Kato lives an unsatisfactory life. I loved the term “Retired Man Syndrome” that the author (or rather one of her characters uses) in reference to the boredom and lack of purpose men experience after a lifetime of working. I loved the idea of a rent-a-grandparent/parent as a way for both retirees and younger people/families to fill a need and develop relationships.

Overall, Mr. Kato and his story is a bit depressing. I was hoping for the journey to lead to a much more heart-felt and warming ending. While there is somewhat of a satisfying ending, I was clear that Mr. Kato learned what he needed to by the end of the book. However, that could be due to the translation of book written in German about Japanese culture. Perhaps the message was “lost in translation”.

I knew I wanted to read this when I saw comparisons to 𝗔 𝗠𝗮𝗻 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗢𝘃𝗲 and 𝗕𝗲𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱, 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂. Mr. Katō has recently retired and is struggling to find his purpose. He’s so lonely and has a hard time communicating with his family. He takes on a job pretending to be a family member to strangers for various reasons and finds joy in interacting with these different families. It was all so weird.
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Maybe something was lost in translation but I just found this book really odd and depressing. I wanted to root for Mr. Katō but I never really connected with the character. There’s definitely a lot to unpack in the idea of being alone even when with your family but this little book didn’t do it for me.

Being recently retired, Mr. Kato is lost at how to navigate and use his free time. During his walks, he daydreams about numerous adventures, imagination running wild as he creates a wonderland out of the most mundane things. But at the end of the day, reality hits him hard on the face and bringing his feet back down to solid ground. His life changes when he is hired to play in as a family member; be it a grandfather, a husband, or a work superior, Mr. Kato excellently acts out his assigned role, as if it was truly his own family.

With the main character being too imaginative, I was lost for most of the book. I couldn’t differentiate the real events to the imaginary scenarios. It is a slice of life kind of book, but it felt too disconnected that I can’t piece together the story properly.

The writing is wonderful, I enjoyed a handful of paragraphs and quotes. I believe this remarkable paragraph fully encapsulates the book,

“But that’s how it is with old people. Some grow forgetful, others don’t and everyone constructs their past in their own way, deleting this and inventing that, painting over certain details however they see fit.”

An interesting, feel good story with a compelling storyline and very well developed characters. Most enjoyable!

I’m not sure what to think of this book, because I wasn’t sure what was really happening and what was only happening in the mind of the unnamed main character. I actually didn’t think his wife was real for most of this book. He has recently retired, and he feels regret over the things he didn’t accomplish in his life, shame for becoming estranged from his family, and desperation to be noticed. Luckily a strange woman pops out from behind a tree in a cemetery and offers him a job pretending to be someone else.

The book did give me some things to think about, but overall I was just confused and not that interested in the outcome. I did enjoy the narrator of the audiobook.

I did feel very engaged with this book as I started reading it and it felt promising as a book that addresses what people feel like upon retiring in Japan. But as I continued reading, it just seemed to ramble here and there and without a very great purpose. That shouldn't be a total deterrent for a reader such as myself, but the pervasive feeling of hopelessness got to be too much.
I also disliked the way it was set up on a page and felt it might be more successful with less text on each page and with some shorter paragraphs. The reader needs a bit of a break for this kind of content!

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I'm sure it will appeal to a different reader.

I was really hoping to love this book. Normally, I do love myself a grumpy elderly man trying to understand what to do with their time after retirement. Unfortunately, this didn’t do it for me.

The book follow Mr Kato (more or less), a retired Japanese man who doesn’t really know what to do with his time now that he doesn’t go to the office anymore, who I believe is having trouble trying to negotiate how to be at home with his wife, and who I think is a little bit depressed by the lack of direction of his life. While visiting a cemetery, he meets Mei, a woman who plays family: she can be hired as an actor to play someone’s wife, daughter, granddaughter, colleague, and so on. She offers Mr Kato a job, and Mr Kato accepts.

The premise is truly lovely, and made me hope for a sweet redemption story the likes of A man called Ove. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get past the sheer unlikability of Mr Kato. You spend the whole book in his brain, and the truth is that he thinks a lot of mean things. I do understand it’s because he is a bit old fashioned, but the fact that he wasn’t making any effort to get past his biases didn’t help me. And I also found the book to be so very sad. There was an aura of loneliness in the whole playing family set up that I couldn’t shake.

Conversely, this is the part of the story that I really liked as well. If the reason why you read is, as in my case, to understand other people and other cultures, then I think that this story really does capture the loneliness of an ageing society like the Japanese one. Now mind you, I have never been to Japan, so this might be a stereotypical read on my part, but loneliness has definitely been a constant in all the books set in Japan I have ever read. This book was the first to REALLY make me understand what it is about. Hence the sadness.

As an educator, I would not recommend teachers to pick this up within their curriculum (especially because I don’t see the connection between this book and the history or citizenship classroom), but I would recommend to add it to suggested home readings. The writing is beautiful and it does help with developing an understanding of the other. Just make sure you check your content warnings and don’t give it to students who are struggling with an estranged parent or with family members with a long term illness.

Milena Michiko Flašar’s Mr. Katō Plays Family is being compared to Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove. At least, it is so by the publicity department at the former novel’s publisher. The reason why is that both books share a “new lease on life” theme, but in the case of the book up for review here — and I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the publicists who must have a tough job marketing this unconventional novel — I’m just not seeing it. The two books, in my view, have about as much in common as oil and water. In Backman’s book, Ove (or Otto in the Americanized movie version) is something of a curmudgeon. In Flašar’s novel, her main character is less so and is a bit of a daydreamer. The book’s genesis, though, is interesting in that its author is of Japanese-Austrian descent. The book was written in German (and translated into English) even though it is set in Japan and features Japanese characters. It’s also a relatively short book, the sort of thing you can read on a lazy Saturday morning. However, it does take a while to get into, because the main plot doesn’t kick in until a third of the way into the book. It also feels as though it is several novels mashed together as one.

Mr. Katō Plays Family is a book about the titular character, a recent retiree who likes to take long walks around his Japanese neighbourhood thinking about a dog he will never be allowed to own on account of his wife’s objections. Much of the novel (or the first part of it, at least) is a stream-of-consciousness-like internal monologue. Mr. Katō talks regularly with an area homeless person and sometimes, during his musings, wonders what his wife might be up to with her fitness instructor. One day, he gets caught dancing in a graveyard by a young woman named Mie. She works with an agency that hires actors to briefly “replace” family members by relatives who want to have an interaction with them that they wouldn’t dare to in reality. Well, Katō takes an offer for work and is pretty soon finding himself — without his wife or adult children knowing — being asked to be one of these stand-ins. Eventually, he gets a visit from his pregnant daughter, which may be in due time due to a heart defect Katō has that we’re told about by the author on the very first page of the novel. And if that all sounds a bit disjointed, it is.

Is Mr. Katō Plays Family worth recommending? The answer is both yes and no. The “no” part first: the first third of the novel feels like padding and filler to bring what would otherwise be a short story or a novella up to a full-fledged novel length. I found it to be tedious. I don’t want to be mean or churlish, but the fact remains that watching a man wander about and think to himself doesn’t offer very many meaningful opportunities for high drama. However, by the time the main protagonist is working as a stand-in, the book really picks up and becomes interesting as much as it seems to be implausible. After all, wouldn’t other people notice that an actor has been hired to replace a much-loathed (or much-loved) relative? Still, it’s the interactions that Katō has with people that are alternatively touching and mesmerising. (And that’s not to speak of Mie, who — in a rather poignant section — takes on the job of briefly replacing a couple’s deceased 14-year-old daughter.) However, and this is going to give a little bit away so stop reading now if you plan on reading this book (and come back to this review later), the stand-in jobs just end for Katō for seeming little reason. It’s as though Milena Michiko Flašar got into a corner and needed some way of painting herself back out of it. Again, I don’t mean to be cruel here in offering criticism, but as much as Mr. Katō Plays Family can be an interesting book, it is also a grossly flawed one.

Whether or not you should read this book is going to come down to how patient you are as a reader, even for shorter works. It really does take some time for this novel to get going somewhere, and once it does it also eventually loses its way somewhat. It’s like the book is shaped like a bell curve: it has an interesting middle, but its beginning and ends lag a little. It may also help if you’re a purveyor of Japanese fiction and like things to be weird. This novel has a little bit of a Haruki Murakami vibe to it, so if you like his books, you may be smitten with this one. And, of course, if you liked A Man Called Ove, you might want to try this one to see if you can spot any resemblance of similarities between the two books as an intellectual exercise. Despite what publicists want readers to think, I must give kudos to the author for writing a book that wasn’t a direct rehash of another work of fiction. The one clear similarity, at least to me, is that these two novels are actually from “international” authors who don’t originate in North America and whose native language is (seemingly) not English. Milena Michiko Flašar has also been feted with some prestigious awards, such as being long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award, so she’s a respected author and that might be enough to get some readers interested in this. But me, I’m of two minds. I wish one part of the book was extended and another part or two trimmed down. Still, Mr. Katō Plays Family is an experiment and like all good experimental fiction, may be something of an acquired taste for readers with a penchant for Japanese main characters. I’ve said it before and will do so again, but it comes down to your mileage varying on this one. Maybe make a trip to the library if you’re interested first. That’s about the only extent of a recommendation that I can, alas, give for Mr. Katō Plays Family in the end.

Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book. Although it is short, I found it a very powerful and unique book. It was an interesting look at the life of a recently retired man trying to figure out what to do with his new life and his relationship with his wife and children whose lives are also evolving. From what I can recall, the main character's real name is unrevealed, nor is the location of the story. I loved how "Mr. Kato" created alternative universes: life with a dog, imaginary grandchildren, etc., and how he revised these scenarios when he had the opportunity to make these alternatives a reality. When he becomes involved in a company which hires people to pretend to be other people on a one-time basis, it was amazing to see how this could be needed and how emotionally involved he could be in these situations. I admired the subtlety of the author as she allowed the readers to figure things out themselves between the lines. I think this book would be a great choice for book discussion groups, particularly for older readers.

Mr. Katō Plays Family 🌕🌕🌕/5
I was extremely hopeful and excited about this book but unfortunately it just fell flat and that makes me sad because it has such potential.

Summary:
An elderly retiree is distant from his wife, children, friends. He doesn’t do much these days except go for walks and reminisce about the past.
One day he meets the enigmatic Mie, who works for a company called Happy Family and invites him to join.
Mr. Katō inserts himself into different roles as a fake family member to anyone who has requested one!
He tries to find value and purpose in his life, marriage and friendships.

A unique plot that piqued my interest. I mean who comes up with a fabulous idea of an old man who’s new job is to play character roles for people requesting to buy a family member?!

💫 I liked Mie who was lively and had this interesting view on life and other peoples needs without judging them.

💫 The problem I found is there is hardly any dialogue! He lives in his own head with his thoughts and there is the constant rambling within his mind.

💫 There are a few instances where he had misogynistic views and I wasn’t comfortable with that.

💫 I found no resolution at the end of the story with his wife. Again, more dialogue please.


Thank you @forgereads & @netgalley for the eARC in return for an honest review.

Rightly compared to “A Man Called Ove”, here again is a grouchy old man who, after retiring cannot find his way in the world. Maybe if he had a dog… though his wife won’t allow one in the house. Or maybe he should tackle arranging the music albums, but no. He comes upon the condition RHS or Retired Husband Syndrome which adequately describes how he feels about his life. One day he is approached by a young woman who runs a company that furnishes fake relatives/acquaintances for people and convinces him to join her. Once he acts as a grandfather to a young boy whose real grandfather disowned the boy’s mother. Another time as a bridegroom’s boss. Once again he finds purpose in his days.
And through this pretending, he begins to find meaning in his real family.

I’m really not sure what to make of this. I got this from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, and I have to say this did not live up to my expectations.
Mr. Katō is an elderly man who is distant from his wife and his adult children. One day on his daily walk he bumps into a woman who calls herself “Mie” and she offers him a job working as a family stand in.

I am sure Mr Kato Plays Family will appeal to many of our readers but I just couldn’t get into it. I found the story unappealing and in some places a little disjointed.
It does have a very eye catching cover which I am sure will draw people to it.

Thank you to #TorPublishing #ForgeBooks and #NetGalley for providing this #ARC Advance Reading Copy. Expected publication date is June 20, 2023.

This novel that follows the story of Mr Kato, a Japanese man who leads a solitary life as a caretaker in Austria. He forms an unlikely bond with a young boy named Tomoji, a fellow outsider who is half-Japanese and half-Austrian. Mr Kato becomes a father figure to Tomoji, providing him with guidance and companionship as they both experience the challenges of living in a foreign land.

I’m really not sure what to make of this. I got this from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, and I have to say this did not live up to my expectations.
Mr. Katō is an elderly man who is distant from his wife and his adult children. One day on his daily walk he bumps into a woman who calls herself “Mie” and she offers him a job working as a family stand in. Essentially, he will jump into different people’s lives to stand in for relatives or friends who cannot be there, for whatever the reason- a grandfather, a husband, a boss, etc.
This is one of the slowest books I’ve ever read. It is written nearly entirely in narrative with very little actual dialogue and there are many instances where there is dialogue that cuts off and becomes narrative.
I didn’t find any of the characters to be likable. While I found the idea of someone playing a stand in for a relative to be novel, that actually wasn’t the main point of the book, and I found the overall theme of this to be sad and depressing.
The description compares it to A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman, but having read both I can honestly say it is nothing like that at all.
Thank you to NetGalley for the free copy in exchange for an honest review. I wish I had better things to say about it.