I found Neko Ningen/"Cat Man" looking through one of the furry/anthro stacks and in retrospect that mislead me pretty badly about what kind of story I was going to be reading. This isn't a "Beastars" or a "Brand New Animal" where the fact that many of the characters are animal-people actually matters-- this is one of those stories where the animal-people are aesthetic stand-ins for a particular kind of humans. As a result my feelings about Neko Ningen are a little mixed... but then again, it's just seven chapters long. If it was 70 I might be more hesitant to recommend it, but I guarantee
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you're not going to regret reading something so short. So go and do that! Come back and read my review after-- my analysis won't take much less time to read anyway, and there's no way you're going to regret reading something seven chapter's long. One Piece, this ain't.
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Alright, you're back? Then let's get into it.
As you might have realized, this story is a feminist fable (using "fable" in a value-neutral sense) that transposes how women feel about workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, and other topics of feminist interest into a world where cat-people are discriminated against by humans. Through this transposition, it succeeds at honestly portraying the complexities of how different women react and respond to those topics, and despite a very short runtime manages to pack in a surprising amount of character development for a surprising amount of characters. That space-efficiency is, I think, this story's biggest strength-- where a longer work might have felt like a screed, or a less-dense work might have felt insubstantial, Neko Ningen manages to be readable to a non-feminist without compromising on its ideals. I have to laud the technical competence of the storytelling-- and the art, too, but I'll get to the later-- and for that reason I badly wanted to give it an 8 or even a 9 out of 10.
However...
Neko Ningen's technical competence means I can't bear to call it anything less than "good". But while I can't complain about the amount of introspection the characters do within the narrative, the lack of introspection on a meta-level make it hard for me to actually enjoy this work. As I mentioned earlier, this story is very much a "fable." The evil get punished, and the virtuous triumph. Insofar as this work is concerned, there is an objective, capital-G Good, and it is exactly the feminist ideology the author is trying to promote. Every character flaw is caused by insufficient feminism; all positive character growth is associated with becoming more feminist. (Well, cattist. Whatever. You get where I'm coming from.) I don't blame the characters for this, because that all makes perfect sense within the context of the world built within the work-- but it's very obvious that the world of the work was specifically constructed to enable exactly this kind of uncomplicated fable plausible. Because of that obviousness, this story fails hard at actually being a persuasive to anyone not already inclined to agree with its ideological premises. Perhaps I'm being a little unfair in asking for even more complexity in a story that's 7 chapters long and already sort of packed... perhaps I'm just not the target audience for this work... perhaps my problem is that I live in a different cultural context than the author, and their arguments were never meant to generalize... but this definitely feels like a missed opportunity. The author otherwise managed to avoid the usual failure cases of ideological fables-- there's no sneering condescension or portraying-you-as-the-virgin-and-myself-as-the-chad. But one mistake is as good as a hundred when you're trying to sway someone to your position, and the mistake Neko Ningen makes is completely failing to address why anyone might have a reasoned, rather than reflexive, opposition to any of its point.
Again, I think you should read this work. Maybe you'll find something different-- maybe you *are* the target audience, and this will be a straight nine-out-of-ten. But as impressed as I was by the character work and handling of theme, Neko Ningen's argument for its thesis was neither interesting or convincing. For that, I have to give it a 7/10, and no higher.
As an afterthought, I do want to acknowledge the art. Neko Ningen is minimalist but not simplistic, in a very pleasing way. There's an intentional focus on the themes and characters that would have perhaps been lost with mor distracting art, and there's one scene in particular where the artist adds more detail than usual that really pops as a result. Every character has a distinct visual design, and it feels like the mangaka made a concerted effort to include all the art that was necessary, and nothing that wasn't. Overall I wasn't stunned, or anything, but I would definitely actually characterize the art as a strength.
 Alternative TitlesJapanese: ねこにんげん More titlesInformationType: Manga
Volumes: 1
Chapters: 7
Status: Finished
Published: Jul 9, 2020 to Dec 19, 2020
Theme:
Anthropomorphic
Serialization:
Kurofune pixiv Authors:
Parari (Story & Art) StatisticsScore: N/A1 (scored by - users) 1 indicates a weighted score. Ranked: #522792 2 based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded. Popularity: #48559
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Dec 3, 2025
I found Neko Ningen/"Cat Man" looking through one of the furry/anthro stacks and in retrospect that mislead me pretty badly about what kind of story I was going to be reading. This isn't a "Beastars" or a "Brand New Animal" where the fact that many of the characters are animal-people actually matters-- this is one of those stories where the animal-people are aesthetic stand-ins for a particular kind of humans. As a result my feelings about Neko Ningen are a little mixed... but then again, it's just seven chapters long. If it was 70 I might be more hesitant to recommend it, but I guarantee
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