Apart from the jarring but generally brief lapses into full CGI, Ramen Akaneko is checking all the right boxes. Aside from the obvious – it’s entertaining, it’s likeable, et al – I think there are two main reasons why this series works. First, it has a keen and unerring eye for the subtleties of cats and those who love them. And second, apart from the one conceit that the premise is built around, pretty much everything else is played completely straight. It’s a realistic take on what it would be like if cats could run a ramen shop. More so than, say, Shirokuma Cafe, which embraced absurdity on a more comprehensive scale.
I never really thought about tigers being grumpy during shedding season (or it being later than it is for domestic cats). But the issue for Krishna, I think, is that unless someone is around to brush her vigorously she can’t do anything about it. And as the noodler, that’s a big problem. Hana isn’t really up to the task, and the person who did it before her had her own issues (which we’ll learn about soon enough). The amount of fur coming off Krishna is truly prodigious – there’s a great callback to this in the omakes, where Bunzou can’t resist giving a giant ball of it a whack.
Tamako learns a few secrets (“Cats Get Talkative During Brushing” is the name of the chapter). Sabu was a stray, Hana is actually a longhair, Bunzou inherited the shop from a guy who used to run it as a cart but fell into ill health from eating too much ramen (as you would). That’s when we meet Goshogawara-san (Anzai Chika), a crucial figure in the shop’s recent history. She’s a lawyer and Miki’s assistant, but more importantly a hardcore cat lover who can’t control her impulses. It was her excesses that caused Bunzou to decide never to hire another cat lover, in fact.
Goshogawara is a piece of work – she even regularly comes in posing as a customer in disguise (which is not going to fool a cat). The thing with cats is, in the main they’re introverts. Even when they love you, they like to have their space. They have boundaries, and when people don’t respect them it stresses them out. Goshogawara absolutely stresses the staff out, even when she comes in to assist Miki in dealing with the YouTuber incident (which has made the shop even more popular – maybe too much for the staff’s taste).
Still – customers keep a shop in business. One is them is played in very lively fashion by Megumi Han (she was apparently in Episode 2 as well, but I don’t remember her). She’s a regular (like the sad sack salaryman next to her) but she’s getting fat from too much ramen (as you would). She speculates on some other means of helping out – like cat coins or such, though Bunzou is skeptical of this. The next time she comes in she brings in a giant of a fellow on the grounds that he can really pack it away – and it turns out she’d never met him before inviting him. He blows through two bowls of the special, and a mountain of karaage and gyoza, before more or less asking her out on a date.
You have to understand cat lovers. We can be a bit irrational about it, so if such a thing as this shop really were possible yes, I suspect some folks would be pretty off the hook. We’d obsess over the health of the business and eat too much ramen and talk about it endlessly on social media. In a sense Ramen Akaneko is sort of a mirror held up against cat lovers, showing us what they’re really like (and pretty accurately too, I think). It’s one of those things I suspect you either understand or you don’t.
