Alone on a midsummer night, Cat wakes to find a stranger dressed in yellow ‘rat-a-tap, tapping’ his feet. Captivated by the music of Kutze’s steps, Cat resolves to travel abroad and tread wheat alongside this stranger when he becomes an adult. But first, Cat must grow up in the small port town where he lives with his timpanist grandfather and a father irrevocably obsessed with an unsolved mathematical proof, and which, as part of the series of increasingly surreal events that characterize his life, Cat rescues from a plague of rats by his imitating the yowls of his namesake, the cat. The ‘rat-a-tap, tap’ of Kutze’s steps echoes through Cat’s life as he matures, moves away from the town to become a musician in the big city and, eventually, journeys abroad.



A truly unique coming-of-age tale, ‘Stepp’n on Wheat’ traces the unsettling events and characters encountered by Cat as he grows up, from the mysterious travelling salesman who cheats his town and ruins his father to a colourblind girl named Green.

Translated by: David Karashima