Jayne Joso, having lived and worked in Japan and China, now lives in the UK. She has written extensively on Architecture including writing for the UK’s Architecture Today magazine, and is also highly regarded for her writing on Japanese arts & culture. Her first children’s book was recently published by Benesse in Japan; & her first play, China’s Smile, commissioned in celebration of China’s Children’s Day, enjoyed a long theatre run and was later televised. This is her first novel.

Mark's best friend Jim just jumped from the twentieth floor, forcing him to reassess the way he’s been living. This contemporary rites of passage novel is a calm, cool, and well-controlled fiction debut flooded with warmth and humanity. With the reflection of The Catcher in the Rye and the depth of Anne Enright's The Gathering, it captures the moment following disaster where things can swing either way. Music and literature save Mark as he faces the question: is it ever right to intervene in others' lives? Themes include friendship; class; compassion; altruism and intervention; trust and innocence; belonging.

‘Jayne Joso’s novel skilfully melds the esoteric and the everyday, the surreal and the banal, to create a strangely gripping narrative full of dark humour. Soothing Music for Stray Cats marks the debut of a distinctive voice in contemporary British fiction.’
Joe Moran

'An unexpected and moving story about the redemption of misfits and the consolation of strangers.'
Natalie Haynes

'...may emerge as one of the great, eccentric London novels'
Ian Thomson, TLS.

SAMURAI PHILOSOPHY AND SONGWRITING IN FINSBURY PARK

Soothing Music for Stray Cats is a reflective novel set in central and north London, which will appeal to a youthful male readership and NME fans, with its themes of male suicide, Samurai philosophy, male bonding, and songwriting. Driven by its distinctive colloquial voice, wacky monologues on subjects as diverse as Mike Skinner, Ellen MacArthur and Nelson, its philosophy is upbeat, committed to a world in which strangers still help each other, even though we can seldom intervene when it really matters. Catcher in the Rye meets Kenzaburo Oe’s An Echo of Heaven, by way of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, the text is framed by two suicides, but the messages are positive, in favour of altruism, male friendship, and the camaraderie of strangers in straightened circumstances (the latter a topical theme for the Credit Crunch era). Set in a chilly February in Finsbury Park and central London with its tourist landmarks, the author’s background as an architecture journalist shows through in her strong sense of atmosphere and city spaces. Literary aspects include the shadowing of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and beautiful imagery ranging from cricket, London Tube lines, failing shoes on city streets, naval heroes and monuments. Carrying cover endorsements from comedian and broadcaster Natalie Haynes and journalist Joe Moran, this is a contender for literary prizes, including the Orange.

The novel’s cover carries endorsements from top journalist Jo Moran (Skilfully melds the esoteric and the everyday, the surreal and the banal, to create a strangely gripping narrative full of dark humour, and comedian and broadcaster Natalie Haynes (An unexpected and moving story about the redemption of misfits and the consolation of strangers), as well as artwork by Japanese artist Hiroke Godengi, reflecting the author’s Japanese connections. Having lived and worked in the country, and continuing to write extensively on Japanese arts & culture, Jayne Joso explains the Eastern inspiration for the novel’s character, manic student Kazu, struggling to survive as a lonely and isolated student in London, “I came across The Way of the Samurai when I was living in Japan. For Kazu, the single biggest influence on his life is Hagakure – the code of the Samurai. But it was a British work of fiction that first enticed me to the country: Angela Carter’s “Fireworks”. This short story about a young Englishwoman and her Japanese lover in Tokyo, captivated me as much for its descriptions of space and environment as for the erotic elements.” Fiction, and fiction reading indeed, are the main themes of Soothing Music for Stray Cats, with songwriting being included under the same banner. “In the protagonist, Mark, I wanted to show a character both sub-consciously and consciously engaging with ideas and thoughts – even snatches of sentences - presented in fiction. Great songsters such as Leonard Cohen and bands like The Clash and The Verve also help him face the crisis following his best friend’s suicide.... Another recurrent theme in my work, however, because of my tremendous passion for architecture, will always be “finding the right place”, be it geographical, physical or psychological.”

TALKING TO: JAYNE JOSO

Alcemi: What was one of the biggest challenges in writing Soothing Music for Stray Cats?
Joso: Writing about London. Writing about a more remote, less-travelled place would still pose problems, but I think they would different. Writing about a city, which, whether you live there or not, everyone feels they know, poses huge challenges, and I struggled quite a lot. I was concerned that the London in the novel might feel too distant, too much ‘at odds’ with the readers’ own take on the place. But then someone suggested I read Jonathon Raban’s Soft City, and that helped enormously. Raban’s book reminded me of something Virginia Woolf also grappled with, and that’s the idea of there being versions of a place, in my case a city, and how places form themselves, or are seen in a writer’s mind, and there is always some degree of separation between that territory and the real thing. I think Woolf calls these places ‘phantom cities’, and yes, they have to be authentic, believable, but only in terms of the fiction; so you’re not writing a definitive London, or an ‘everyman’s London’, you’re writing ‘a version’. It has to be convincing and accurate, of course, but once I realised I was writing the narrator’s London, it felt like a major breakthrough. So what you get in the novel is ‘Mark’s London’, and hopefully it’s a place people will recognise and relate to.

A: Do you particularly enjoy writing about cities?
J: Well, there are certain things that might be true of all cities, or the experience of all cities, the excitement they offer, the buzz and sense of opportunity, and then there are the darker aspects, the fear factors if you like, the pressures to keep going at top speed, to ‘keep up’, and the greater potential for loneliness. But to answer your question, I’m interested in all of it really, a city’s dark and sunnier side, and I loved writing about London and landmark places like, Trafalgar Square and Tower Bridge and The Thames, that felt great.

A: What do you think are some of the book’s other main features and themes?
J: Grief and survival, that sense of getting through each day, taking it slowly…easy… or trying to; kindness; risk taking, especially encounters with strangers… let’s face it, they can often go badly! Look at Ian McEwan’s, The Comfort of Strangers!—I love that; and other beautiful stuff, like the effects of good music, and good literature.

A: Speaking of good literature, who are some of the writers you admire?
J: Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, John Steinbeck, Kobo Abe, Jonathan Lethem, Alessandro Baricco, Ian McEwan… Christina Rossetti… I could go on.

A: The novel has a very contemporary feel about it, almost as though it can see the recession coming, what do you make of that?
J: Well, it takes a look at the way some of us have been living the last few years, that’s for sure, the consumerism and acquisitiveness and how that relates to status; it was all a bit empty wasn’t it? Maybe it’s a bit much to say that it sees the recession coming, but yeah, perhaps it hints at it.

A: It says on your website that you think of Japan as your second home, how did that come about?
J: I lived in Japan for quite a long time and made some lifelong friendships. I also enjoy the traditional culture there and a sense of calmness I can’t easily find anywhere else.

A: Going back to the question of cities, do you think you’ll write more fiction with a strong sense of place?
J: I hope so. The idea of finding the right space/place, somewhere a person can feel at home or at ease is really what interests me, and I’m writing something new with that in mind.

www.soothingmusicforstraycats.com
www.jaynejosojapan.com