Is Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

J-kun is a horror manga artist based directly on Junji Ito himself, and his autobiographical diary comic documents what happens when his fiancée A-ko moves her family cat, Yon, into their new home, followed shortly by an energetic Norwegian Forest kitten named Mu. The format is simple: short, diary-style chapters about ordinary domestic cat ownership, filtered entirely through the sensibility of a man whose entire career is drawing nightmares.

What it does well

The joke here is immediately obvious and keeps working anyway: Ito draws the mundane chaos of cat ownership — scratched furniture, territorial standoffs, a cat refusing to use a litter box — with the exact same meticulous dread and exaggerated horror-manga intensity he'd use for a monster attack. The humor isn't really about the cats being scary; it's about J-kun's completely disproportionate emotional reactions to normal cat behavior, rendered in his signature style, which makes for a genuinely funny mismatch between form and content. For longtime readers of his horror work, there's an extra layer of enjoyment in seeing him turn that same intensity toward something this low-stakes and warm.

Where it falls short

This is a very slight, low-ambition book by design — it's a diary comic about a man's cats, and if that premise doesn't appeal to you on its own, the horror-manga gimmick alone isn't going to carry an entire volume. The chapters are short and episodic without much connecting thread beyond "more cat stuff happens," so there's not much to say about pacing or structure because there isn't really meant to be any. It's also very much a one-note joke, repeated across the volume rather than developed or varied in any major way.

Verdict

This is a charming, low-stakes curiosity for fans of Junji Ito who want to see him in an entirely different mode — warm, funny, and genuinely sweet about his own cats, with just enough of his horror-artist instincts bleeding through to make it distinctly his. It's not essential, but it's a nice palate cleanser between his heavier work.