is a manga series written and illustrated by Miwa Abiko. It was featured in Hakusensha's magazine LaLa from June 1988 to January 1995.
A TV anime (stylized みかん絵日記) loosely based on the manga was produced by Nippon Animation and ran from October 16, 1992, to June 18, 1993, on CBC Television, TBS and other JNN affiliates.
Plot Tom, an orange cat, the protagonist of the story, had to leave his home after his owner had died due to illness. After wandering around for a while, he finally arrived at the Kusanagi family, where he was adopted and given a new name, Mikan, based on his orange fur (mikan is the Japanese word for "orange fruit"), but the Kusanagis soon found out that Mikan was no ordinary cat: he could speak human, and could walk on his hind limbs like a human. Shocked at first, the family gradually adopted a more welcoming attitude, and finally accepted the fun-loving cat as one of them. From then on, Mikan got on numerous adventures in the human world as a talking cat, which was kept secret by the Kusanagis. Mikan later got "married", had children, and one of them could also speak human like he did.
Apart from the typical slice-of-life stories, the manga also had some pure fantasy chapters, where Mikan and his gang, through various random means, got into different worlds of magic and dragons. These stories were never adapted for TV.
The TV anime adaptation had a similar premise, featured characters and some plot points from the manga (such as Mikan's backstory, a few relationships between characters, the short travel arc, etc.), but all of its story execution was entirely original. Overall, the manga stories tend to be long and introspective, while the anime stories tend to be short, eventful and suspenseful.
Characters Kusanagi family
The titular character who was an orange cat who could talk and walk on two feet like a human. He was abandoned with his siblings on the countryside road, then adopted and named (after Tom Cat) by an old man known as Tatsuzō. After his original owner died because of an unmentioned disease, he had to leave his home as the neighborhood couldn't accept an abnormally "witchy", yokai-like cat, even though his owner's friend, an old woman, insisted that she would take care of him. He then wandered around aimlessly, concealing his unusual abilities by walking on all fours and not talking (although sometimes he would still do those if he thought he was alone), until he met a boy who shared his name, Tom Kusanagi. He proceeded to follow the boy to the home of the Kusanagis. The family later adopted Tom, and Tom Kusanagi named him Mikan (Japanese for "orange fruit") based on his orange fur. The family soon found out that Tom was no ordinary cat: he could speak human and walked on his two hind paws. The first one to discover this was Tom Kusanagi, who found it suspicious that Mikan routinely got sick in the morning and refused to have breakfast, while at the same time, the amount of sake in the kitchen kept declining. It turned out that Mikan had been sneaking in there and drinking it while everyone was sleeping at night. Tom later convinced Mikan to tell his parents about his abilities so that he could finally be one of the family, as he couldn't stand keeping it a secret from his parents, who loved Mikan that much. Mikan was reluctant at first, as people's response to his abilities had been anything but positive, but he decided to give it a try. And fortunately, the family welcomed his presence, accepted him as one of them, although they still wanted to keep all of this a secret not to get Mikan in any trouble. Mikan later made new friends with the cats in the neighborhood, and engaged in several adventures with his gang. He eventually "married" a cat named Killy and had kittens; one of them, Ringo, was later adopted by the Kusanagis, too, and then learned to speak human like his father. In the manga, as nosy as he was, Mikan was quite well-behaved. In the anime, however, he was made to be more of a selfish troublemaker who did anything he liked as he was pleased, and he could also musically enunciate with the harmonica to bother pretty much everyone (human and feline alike). On the other hand, thanks to his experience as a stray cat, he was also quite sensible, even more so than Tom when it came to adult affairs. Despite that, he still maintained a childlike mindset of a cat and sometimes even equated human matters with feline ones, or had a hard time fathoming the concepts of "foreign", "Australia" or "America".
The only biological son of the Kusanagi family and Mikan's adoptive brother. He was an ingenuous, caring 11-year-old brother, who assigned Mikan the picture diary homework, a common type of homework for Japanese grade schoolchildren, to record his daily life with words and illustrations, which was the solution to Mikan's strong interest in helping his brother with 5th grade homework (even though Mikan could do nothing but write hiragana and numbers). After that, Mikan started to document his daily life with the diary, filling it with untidy scribbles and illustrations. Like any other sibling, Tom quarreled with Mikan a lot. He went to Yozakura Elementary School during the course of the manga.
Tom's 37-year-old birth father and Mikan's adoptive father, working as a computer engineer. He wasn't welcoming Mikan at first, even went so far to say that he would have only adopted a dog. Later, he became a loving father who gave both of his sons valuable lessons on life and love. He also enjoyed having drinks with Mikan. In the manga, he was always an understanding father and husband, and never fought with his wife, which is why the girl Tom liked, Kyōko, adored him so much. That was not the case in the anime, as shown when he got home late and got angry because his wife, who was also upset about him being late, didn't prepare dinner.
Tom's 34-year-old birth mother and Mikan's adoptive mother, née Matsuzawa. A typical stay-at-home mother, she took care of the whole family, which made daily activities a little bit more difficult when she had to leave home to take care of her own sick mother. She was scared of height. She also gave birth to a girl, although the Kusanagis' daughter wasn't mentioned much in the course of the manga.
Mikan and Killy's son. He was named, by Tom just like his father was, Ringo (Japanese for "apple") due to his red fur, and also nicknamed (lit. "Little Apple") because Mikan felt like Ringo wasn't good enough considering apples tend to be bigger than oranges. He was the only one of Mikan's children who were adopted by the Kusanagis; the rest were given away to other people. Ringo managed to learn to speak human somehow, which was tremendous to the Kusanagis, although this caused a little bit of a problem at first as Mikan then lost his ability to speak for unknown reasons. Sera, Tom's best friend, even said it was probably because there could be only one talking cat in the world which was rather crushing to Mikan. Fortunately, everything was back to normal when Mikan regained his ability to speak somehow. Ringo could speak intelligibly, although with a few impediments (he said otō-tan, okā-tan and Tomu-kyun instead of the correct otō-san "dad", okā-san "mom" and Tomu-kun). He called Tōjirō "Dad" and Mikan "Dad Mikan" (simply "Mikan" when he first uttered to the shock and slight disappointment of his own father). Ringo later moved to live with Yukio Tanabe, a lonely old woman who he and his girlfriend Kyara adored so much. In the anime, he was known only as Koringo, and even to the end, could still mimic only random human words (especially food-related ones). The whole event of Mikan losing his ability to speak human from the manga (at which point, Ringo could speak fairly competently) was never adapted.
Other cats and dogs
His name literally means "black rims" in reference to his fur pattern. He was the wisecrack guy of the gang and Mikan's best buddy. Originally a half-stray cat (a cat who sometimes takes food that people give away), he was adopted by the owner of the Runon coffee shop as the main attraction of the shop, as Kurobuchi looked very much like him. He eventually "married" Hana after overcoming all the obstacles in their epic romance story and have a bunch of kittens, one of whom was a daughter who looked just like him. In the anime, Kurobuchi is portrayed as "lady's man": he brought food to all the cat ladies he knew. His subsequent relationship with Hana was only minimally denoted in a few small gags.
His name means "tree peony", but also "wild boar meat", perhaps because he was the biggest and fattest cat in the story, weighing 13 kilograms. He really adored his owner Yayoi, got along with her parents-in-law, but at the same time, despised her husband Yukihiko (him and him alone) just as much and bullied him every time he could. He dated Molly even though he was castrated. He was a Chinchilla Persian cat. In the anime, it wasn't clear if he dated anyone at all.
A shy Siamese cat who couldn't help but upsetting his owner by frequently "accidentally" peeing where he wasn't supposed to, which got him punished by being locked out, which in turn made him feel like he wasn't loved. That proved not to be true, as he found out when all of his family rushed home from vacation after they had heard a burglar had broken into their home, only to check on him. Thankfully, there was still his cat gang who helped him fend off the intruder and he could "reunite" with his family in tears. In the anime, Karma was neutered sometime as mentioned episode 23. He went on to turn gay and hit on Kurobuchi, even so far as to be jealous of Hana. Nothing much was mentioned about his relationship with his owners.
Nicknamed or , he was a dog who loved cats because he had been raised by a cat mother and grown up with kittens. He lived with Dr. Inagaki during the time his original owner and Inagaki's close friend, Mr. Ōhashi, was overseas. He was Mikan's close friend. Mikan would unleash him and take him to the playground where Mikan played with him until he was tired and fell asleep. That, however, led to trouble one day, as Momoji decided, when Mikan was still sleeping, to just walk straight to Tokyo which was very far away to see his owners, not knowing that they hadn't arrived from overseas just yet. When learning this, Mikan had to call on all the cats in the neighborhood and went in search of Momoji. Thankfully, they found him eventually and took him home. He was later adopted by Dr. Inagaki.
, nicknamed Chibitarō due to his small stature, and Ste-chan by his owner, was a Russian Blue. He lived with a rich family and enjoyed the most luxury treats, but he rarely got to get out of the house and hang out with everyone. His character was expanded in the anime in a full episode in which he snuck out of his home with Mikan to explore the unfamiliar world and have fun with snow.
Botan's close friend, he lived with a fishmonger. He was very good at catching mice as he'd grown up in a farmhouse, as opposed to Botan who was terrible at it. Despite living among an abundance of fish, he was well-behaved and never dared to steal from his owner.