The Cat from the Kimono by Nancy Peña

This graphic novel says it's based on a folktale, and I have no reason to doubt that. Whether it's an ancient, well-known folktale or one made up by creator Nancy Peña to fit the story she wants to tell...there I do wonder a bit.

It's such a wonderfully visual story, one perfectly aligned with Peña's illustrative, pattern-filled pages. It's open-ended, with a clear beginning that turns into multiple possibilities - which also feeds the style she uses to tell this story, switching from storybook-style big images with captions for the pure folktale into comics-style grids (mostly three tiers) with speech balloons for the complications, the portions that are clearly and entirely Peña's.

It doesn't really matter whether she found a folktale she could adapt so well or made it up, but it does make me think about the creative impulse, and wonder which of the two it was.

The Cat from the Kimono was published in 2020 in France - Peña is French; she works in that language - and translated into English by Montana Kane for this 2023 edition.

The legend goes that, sometime long ago in Japan - I would guess after unification, during the Edo period, but time is rarely specific in folktales - there was a beautiful young woman, the daughter of the owner of a silk mill. The best weaver in the mill was in love with her; she did not reciprocate. He made her various beautiful kimonos to show his love; she only loved the very first one he made, printed all over with cats. He got angry; things went bad, somewhat supernaturally, on the kimonos. And one cat from that first kimono ran off the silk and out into the real world.

This is the story of that cat's adventures - perhaps somewhat later in time, perhaps meant to be right after running away. Again: folktales don't say "and then, three days later, on the fifth of March" or anything like that.

In Peña's story, the cat stowed away on a ship and made its way to London, where he weaved through the stories of a few Victorian-era people - a girl named Alice, a brilliant consulting detective, and a few less-obvious characters. Peña tells her story in alternating sections - first the folktale, then some comics pages, then usually a blackout page, and back to the folktale. Sometimes we get multiple comics scenes, with one set of characters and then another, and sometimes we just get one group, and then back to the folktale.

Peña tells the main folktale in full at the beginning - up to the cat running away. When she returns to it, it's for a series of variations and questions: where could the cat have gone? what are the versions of the story? how many endings does this story have? And she closes with the folktale as well, giving - in that very fabulistic manner - mostly questions and options, before ending with a slender thread of "well, there is one version of the story that says thus."

Peña's folktale pages are lush and ornate; her comics pages are precise and detailed. She moves from one format into the other effortlessly, back and forth, to tell one story in both modes. Cat from the Kimono is a wonderful expansion of a fable, no matter its origins.