If Cats Disappeared from the World 2016

An unnamed young man, a quiet, solitary Tsutaya who works as a postman, receives a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. As he grapples with the ache of knowing he may not be remembered, he returns home to encounter a startling figure who claims to be the devil—Postman / Devil. This eerie doppelgänger presents a chilling bargain: if the man agrees that one kind of thing will be erased from the world (as if it had never existed), he will be granted one more day of life instead of dying the next morning. The premise unfolds with a calm, almost clinical sense of inevitability, as if time itself is a negotiable currency.

Under the devil’s terms, each extra day comes at a price: the world will lose a chosen thing, removed at the end of that day. The first day sees phones vanish, leaving communication stripped down to silence and handwritten notes. The next day, movies disappear from public and private life, narrowing the man’s social world to memory and momentary, face-to-face exchanges. Then clocks vanish, muting schedules and rhythms that once marked his days. And finally, cats disappear, a detail that speaks to the intimate, domestic texture of his world. These removals are not grand events but quiet, disorienting shifts that force the man to confront how dependent he is on the everyday objects and rituals that once felt trivial.

As the world reshapes itself, the man discovers how fragile his relationships really are. The changes ripple through his life in ways that reveal what he values most: the fragments of connection with others, the rituals of ordinary days, and the private rituals tied to his late mother, whose memories are tethered to a cat he inherits. The memory of his Postman Father and Postman Mother surfaces in conversations, photographs, and long-ago moments that are reshaped by the missing items, turning nostalgia into a lens for evaluating what a life is worth. This is a story about how love, memory, and time hold each other up even as the world around them dissolves.

The narrative unfolds through a two-track structure, weaving present-day events with a series of flashbacks that illuminate the young man’s backstory and the foundations of his fragile ties. Through these vignettes, the viewer gains a deeper understanding of the people who mattered to him and the quiet pain of mortality. The film invites contemplation on what remained when the things he thought defined him were stripped away—and what endures when the world simplifies to essentials. It is a meditation on the beauty and pain of being alive, a reminder that even when even the smallest comforts disappear, memory and love can still offer a solitary, lasting light. Bold, intimate, and thoughtfully restrained, the story invites readers to feel the weight of every ordinary moment that survives the erasures.