Speculative fiction in literature walks a precarious tightrope. At its best, it can be a profound, provocative lens for understanding the contradictions in the world around you through a fantastical mirror of our own. At worst, it can hit like a forgettable Black Mirror episode, whose narrative crux begins and ends with “What if your mum ran on batteries?” Wandering Cat’s Cage is a manga that emphatically belongs in the former category for how it flips its otherwise overly familiar premise on its head and leaves room to contemplate its message long after it’s punched you in the face.
Wandering Cat’s Cage, by Akane Torikai (Saturn Return) and translated by Jocelyne Allen (My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness), is a speculative fiction manga whose tale echoes Brian K. Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra’s comic series, Y: The Last Man. Like that Vertigo Comics series, Wandering Cat’s Cage is set in a matriarchal world where most men have died off, but it’s told exclusively from a female perspective. Most being the operative word. Its story follows two outcasts: Sanada, a fair-haired acupuncturist; and Reiho, the only man she’s ever met. The two live in Not Town, a slum that offers plenty of freedom to those willing to hustle for it. Across the river from Not Town is a scenic view of their impoverished squalor from its diametric opposite: The Town, a decadent metropolis with far less freedom.
While, on paper, the prospect of a man living like a rooster in a post-apocalyptic henhouse could lend itself to an eye-rolling premise focused heavily on the how and why of its world, Torikai doesn’t romanticize the situation. Nor does she use it as a vehicle to play contrarian by blaming men as the root cause of societal malaise. What she jabs at is the heart of how people, regardless of gender, are treated like second citizens thanks to the machine of patriarchal society. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Torikai weaves a tale where, despite flipped power dynamics, women are not afforded autonomy over their bodies in its near-future dystopia.
Not to spoil how that big thematic swing plays out, but if you’ve ever joked—cynically or otherwise—about menstruation becoming illegal in the U.S., Wandering Cat’s Cage takes that fear and uses it as a launch point for its critique of how autonomy is policed across both The Town and Not Town. Torikai pairs that with an equally compelling look at Reiho, whose life as a sex worker isn’t treated as salacious or used for shock value so much as another tightrope of compromised agency. His autonomy hangs in the balance just as precariously as that of the older clients who can afford his time. And Torikai’s restraint in what she says—and doesn’t say—about him makes that thought-provoking tension hit even harder, like a mirror reflecting our own present.
Before I even got too deep into Wandering Cat’s Cage, I was immediately enthralled by the career trajectory that led its mangaka to pen such a malignantly uncomfortable and distressing story. Torikai started out like most female mangaka, penning shojo (a manga demographic marketed to young girls) stories before branching into the more adult genres of josei (the demographic for older women) and seinen (same, but for older men).
Torikai’s claim to fame as a mangaka is her critiques and exploration of harder-to-swallow topics like depression, trauma, and sexual assault told from an unflappable feminist perspective. Look no further than her 2013 psychological drama Kodansha series, Sensei’s Pious Lie—a manga about a high school teacher and her male student commiserating over their shared trauma of sexual assault while confronting the power imbalance and societal pressure to continue functioning in polite society—as evidence of her deft hand in navigating tough, real-world problems in a frank and thoughtful manner. This is a woman who knows her shit, and won’t serve up platitudes as a bookend to her work, and Wandering Cat’s Cage is no exception.
Despite all signs pointing towards Wandering Cat’s Cage being a tough read, Torikai breaks things up by bringing some witty and charming levity to her speculative fiction hellscape. My favorite bits are scenes where the paradox of Sanada living in refuge is punctuated by her waltzing through town while nursing her Starbucks coffee. I also got a hoot out of Sanada and her gal pals’ plight to earn enough money to hire Reiho just so they can learn what a ding-a-ling looks like. I cannot stress enough how repressed this society is. We joke about how poor schools have failed us on sex education, but Wandering Cat’s Cage takes that to the utmost extreme both for comedy and drama without having either tone work disproportionately to the other. Which is really miraculous to thumb through its fine-line art pages and uncover for yourself, considering this manga is Torikai’s first venture into the genre—which she notes to have been incredibly nervous about in its foreword. My two cents: she did a phenomenal job.
What makes this even more quintessential is that Wandering Cat’s Cage isn’t some hot-off-the-presses tale; it’s a 2017 manga that’s only now being localized in English by Fantagraphics’s East Asian comics imprint, <a href="https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2025-10-31/fantagraphics-launches-new-east-asian-comics-imprint-takumigraphics-which-will-re-release-wandering-/.230514″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Takumigraphics. Speaking anecdotally, I got just as much out of meditating over Wandering Cat’s Cageas I did reading Deb Aoki’s insightful interview with Torikai about how its speculative fiction themes concerning community, family, class, power, and love were informed by the mangaka’s own lived experiences. I’m a huge proponent of manga (and anime) lovers broadening their horizons beyond shonen. Pick up Ai Yazawa’s josei manga, Nana;contemplate Makoto Yukimura’s seinen viking epic, Vinland Saga; For the love of god, do yourself a favor, and watch Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day. Diversify your media diet! Shonen is fun, but there are plenty more stories bound to change you ever so slightly after experiencing them that don’t get as much play and deserve just as much love. If speculative fiction is your jam, I highly recommend adding Wandering Cat’s Cage to your shelf.
Wandering Cat’s Cage is available for preorder and releases on October 27.
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