Café owners by day, art thieves by night, the three sisters Hitomi, Rui, and Ai have high-risk lives outside of their day jobs. Hitomi especially needs to keep her secret under wraps, since she's dating Toshio—the police officer assigned to catch the Cat's Eye thief!

Cat's Eye's targets are easy to spot: They're all art pieces authored by acclaimed genius painter Heinz. What museums don't know is that this artist is the missing father to the three “Cat's Eye” siblings.

As the sisters reclaim one piece after another, spreading their infamous name, a conspiracy gradually begins to reveal itself. How can their father come out of hiding when the bloodthirsty syndicate that betrayed him to steal his work and fame—many of whom were once his closest apprentices and art collectors—are still so powerful in the art world?

When Cat's Eye tightropes another canvas out of a heavily guarded exhibit, the cops are pressed to apprehend the thief. Can the sisters discover the truth about their missing father? Or will they be apprehended by Hitomi's star-crossed lover Toshio or killed by the looming syndicate responsible for the father's disappearance.

As the heists continue, the stakes only get higher.

Cat's Eye has art and story by Tsukasa Hōjō. English translation is done by Andrew Charles Love and lettering by Barri Shrager. Published by Kana (September 23, 2025). Rated OT.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

It's hard to go wrong with Tsukasa Hōjō's manga. That's what makes it so significant that, at long last, we're getting English translations of at least two of his major works. (I'm hopeful for more; my favorites are actually his short story collections.) I tend to prefer Cat's Eye over City Hunter, so I'm particularly delighted to be able to reread it in Kana's lovely new edition – it may not be a hardcover, but it's a beautifully put together paperback omnibus of the first three volumes in the series, complete with dust jacket and color pages. Even better, the dust jacket doesn't show fingerprints and has a flexible spine that doesn't crease easily. These are the things that make my bibliophile heart happy.

And the story's fun, too! An entry into the kaito (mysterious thief) genre, Cat's Eye follows the Kisaragi sisters as they work to steal back their presumed-late father's artworks and collection, while running a café by day. This serious story, which is doled out slowly over the course of the omnibus, is tempered with plenty of kooky antics, mostly courtesy of the men in the story. While Rui, Hitomi, and Ai are all competent women with a variety of very particular skills, Hitomi's boyfriend-enemy, Toshio, is kind of a bumbling idiot – at least when it comes to catching Cat's Eye. He somehow doesn't make the connection between his nemesis' name being exactly the same as his girlfriend's family business, tells Hitomi pretty much everything about his job, and even at one point has the entire team working on the case meet at the café. It's kind of mind-boggling.

But as the book goes on, you have to start to wonder if Toshio is really that stupid. In a later mysterious thief series, Saint Tail, the detective who's involved with the thief admits that he just doesn't want to see it even though he knows the truth deep down; this happens in a couple of other series as well. So perhaps Toshio does know what Hitomi and her sisters are up to. He just doesn't want to think the woman he's been in love with since high school is really the criminal he's pursuing, so he turns a blind eye to all of the evidence in front of him, to the point where he keeps shutting down his new partner, Mitsuko. Very few people know Cat's Eye's reasons, after all, so maybe Toshio suspects that it's a valid one.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book from a historical perspective is the way that Hojo struggles with the sexist norms of 1980s Japan. Hitomi is groped for laughs quite a bit, and people are shocked that Mitsuko is a police detective. Toshio and some of the other male characters repeatedly make sexist remarks that infuriate the women, from high schooler Ai on up. It feels like Hojo is using a lot of these hoary old staples despite himself, throwing them in because they're expected rather than because they're actually funny or belong in the story. This could be me reading too much into it because I've read his series F. COMPO, which is an early work about a trans couple with a genderfluid child, but it's still a possibility given the way the women react.

With a good translation, plenty of little guest appearances by Hojo himself at the café and gags about “why are you reading these fake newspapers in the story,” and one of my personal favorite characters in Ai, Cat's Eye is more than worth picking up. It has the marks of being one of Hojo's earliest works, but even in this omnibus you can see it all evening out into an even better story.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

For American manga fans of a certain longevity, Tsukasa Hōjō's comes with a nostalgia for an early attempt to bring classic seinen manga to America in the short-lived, but ambitious, Raijin Comics. This magazine initially included City Hunter among its manly exploits, but until now we've never had a manga adaptation of Cat's Eye. This volume of the seinen version of Saint Tail is exactly as fun and exasperating as any other gentleperson thief story.

Rui, Hitomi, and Ai are three sisters who run a café called Cat's Eye. Toshio, the cop who hangs out at the café, has had a crush on Hitomi since high school and has a current obsession with the mysterious jewelry and art thief, also known as Cat's Eye. So, you already know he's as dumb as a stump. It's hard to believe he's made it past a beat cop, frankly, as he is oblivious to Hitomi pumping him for information about the police plans to protect the art…then confused and annoyed when Cat's Eye steals the item from under his nose.

But, like every other caper story, you're not really here for the theft, but for the caper part. Cat's Eyes exploits are increasingly creative, especially when a female detective comes on to the scene and pegs that Hitomi and Cat's Eye wear the same scent.

The last third of the volume is very much about romantic relationships, between Hitomi and Toshio and Ai and a boy in her class, Kono, whose life is upended when Cat's Eye completes their next score. This volume ends as Cat's Eye has to go up against another art and jewelry thief, the Rat.

Because the premise requires a substantial removal of one's critical thinking to make it work, this story does well for something to sit back, relax, and read without too much thought. A good vacation read.