The Way of the Cat (猫侍 )!

 My Bride bagged the "one-free-month" sub to Amazon Prime late in December. So far she's been disappointed that most of the movies that are worth watching aren't free, and the ones that are free are worth shit.

(I could have told her that before she did, if I didn't value my ass...)

I'm not nearly as arsed about the movie thing (at least, not nearly as pissed off as when fucking Comcast moved the old movie channel ("Turner Classic Movies") over to the pay side, the bastards.) and so I've tooled around the site looking for entertainment options, and in so doing stumbled across 猫侍 - the first season of Neko Zamurai, a 2013 series presumably aired on NHK.

It's just a goof, on both the classic Kurosawa-style samurai tropes as well as cats and cat people in general. It's silly, sometimes serious, often funny, and truly, deeply weird in ways that only genuinely Japanese pop culture is weird.

The macguffin is that our hero, an out-of-work samurai (or ronin) is trying to get hired on with a new daimyo in Edo-period Tokyo. This is working out about as well as you'd think (you might not recall but we discussed the problems the samurai-class ran into after the end of the warring states period back when we talked about Shiroyama in 2011) and he's about at the end of his katana when a flunky for the local mob boss comes to him with an offer.

Turns out the boss has recently become hooked up with a cat and has gone all gooney over the possum, neglecting his yakuza-y business. Flunky wants to pay Madarame - the ronin/samurai - to put a hit on the kitty.

Of course he can't, and the rest of the series is about his misadventures trying to hang on to his new furry friend whilst dodging the Hanzo-the-Razor detective parody, Shimazaki.

Of course there's a cat-crap-ton of other silly business, including Madarame's adorable neighbor Wakana the donut vendor...

...and his local vet and sorta-crazy-cat lady Oshizu who tries to make him smile while teaching him the Way of the Cat (for a guy who's faithful to his wife back in the country Madarame seems to run into all sorts of adorable cat-ladies...).

There's even an Edo-period cat cafe just because, well, cats.

So far it's been good fun (tho it's hard to see how the showrunners will get a happy ending out of it - the detectives are closing in on our hero and he's set himself up to take a dive in the big swordfight against his old comrade/rival, so we'll see...) both on it's own and as a send up of both classic chanbara (チャンバラ) flicks as well as modern Japan, cats, and cat-support-staff (of which I am self-admittedly one).

Very watchable, if you're in the mood for a light and clever trifle.

nyaa! にゃー!

(A note on にゃー!: The Japanese expression for the sound a cat makes is "nya", and the characters in the show use it a fair bit, so I've been hearing it regularly for a while now. 

It still seems very odd, since even as they say it, it doesn't sound like "meow". But just like "wan" is the noise a Japanese dog makes, "nya" is a Japanese cat, and that's just how it is. Funny thing, language.

But what is kind of odd is that the title of this show is written in hiragana as 猫侍. In romaji you'd write that Neko Zamurai and translate it precisely as "Cat Samurai", which makes total sense given that the show is about a samurai that is all about his kitty.

But for some reason the title is regularly given in English as "Samurai Cat";

which totally doesn't work, because it implies that the samurai IS the cat, and is also the title of an actual pop culture thing, the Nineties series of heavy-handed satirical light novels by someone named Mark E. Rogers. 

Nya!)