Neko
Atsume: Kitty Collector is a cellphone game about collecting cats. It
is not a complicated game. It is, in fact, barely a game at all. And yet
I have become obsessed with it.
The
goal of Neko Atsume is to get cats to visit your virtual home and
garden. To entice them, you must leave out various foods (kibble, canned
food, sashimi), toys (balls, yarn, a paper bag) and things to lie on
(pillows, cushions, plush macaroons). Also: boxes, space heaters,
umbrellas, pots, a goldfish bowl and a cowboy hat. The cats will visit,
in varying quantity and kind, depending on what you put out for them.
When the cats visit, you can photograph them and keep the photographs in
your “Catbook,” a virtual photo album. The cats arrive and leave
mysteriously. You never see them come or go; they are simply there, at
play or at rest. Sometimes, when interacting with a toy, the cats move.
Most of the time, they do not. Only one cat ever comes close to the act
of eating: a fat white fluffy guy named Tubbs who lies on his back near
the bowl, mouth still dirtied with food, extremely content.
When
the cats disappear — when they’ve tired of their toys or beds or when
the food is gone — they leave behind little fish, in silver and gold.
These fish are the currency used in the game to buy more food and toys,
to attract more cats. The cats arrive, the cats leave; you buy more
food, put out new toys; the cycle repeats. Eventually, if you save up
enough fish, you are able to remodel, either purchasing a bit more space
or changing the look of the yard. If a certain cat visits enough times,
it leaves you a memento — usually something very strange, presumably
found in another yard. My favorite is the cast-off skin from a molting
cicada.
That is pretty much all there is to Neko Atsume.
I
am not the only one who finds this unexpectedly engrossing. A lot of
people are obsessed with Neko Atsume. By the end of last year, the game
had been downloaded 10 million times, and it made several critics’
year-end top-10 lists. The game’s developer, Yutaka Takasaki, is
dumbfounded by its popularity: “I do not know why this game is so
popular,” he told CNN.
Personally,
I had a sneaking suspicion why, and it had something to do with
aesthetics — something to do with Neko Atsume’s Japanese nature. Wasn’t
there something about the game’s look and feel that tapped into the
western obsessions with kawaii — Japanese cuteness — and the
traditions of Japanese art? (It was, after all, even more popular
outside Japan.) So I was happy when, last week, I bumped into an old
friend at the local library. He’s getting his Ph.D. in art history, with
a focus on Japanese art and photography, and I was hoping he could
confirm what I suspected about the game — maybe even put some smart
words into smart sentences explaining it. Something about how the
angular structure of the landscape depicted on the vertically oriented
smartphone screen recalled classic Edo-era woodblock work.
My friend looked at my phone for a moment. Then he pulled out his phone and, after a quick search, showed me his screen, which displayed a painting — a maelstrom of cats,
13 or 14 in all, clawing, meowing, tumbling. It did not look like a
wood block print I had in mind. “Have you heard of this guy? Foujita?” I
had not.
Much
like Neko Atsume, Tsuguharu Foujita was a much bigger deal in Europe
and the Americas than he was in Japan. Born in Tokyo, he moved to Paris
when he was 27. Despite knowing no one, he managed to meet Modigliani,
Leger, Picasso and Matisse within the year. He wore his hair styled in a
severe bowl cut, modeled after something he said he’d seen on an
Egyptian statue. He also had a watch tattooed on his wrist and wore
Greek tunics and earrings and, on occasion, on his head, a lampshade.
Foujita’s “Reclining Nude With Toile de Jouy,” a portrait of Man Ray’s
lover Kiki, was wildly popular when it was first shown in 1922 at the
Salon d’Automne. He also painted cats. Nude women and cats, in Japanese
ink, Western style with Eastern sensibilities — that was what Foujita
was famous for.
In
1930, he was hired by a New York publisher and poet named Michael
Joseph to illustrate a book: “The Book of Cats.” Foujita’s etchings
captured an aloofness, a sensitivity to their subjects. The images are
delicate and ferocious — extremely good cat art, in other words — and
“The Book of Cats” went on to be extraordinarily collectible. Fifty
copies were printed and now sell for more than $30,000 a piece.
(Editions that still include an original inset of cat prints, meant to
display apart from the book, sell for up to $77,500.) “This is a book
that will never lose its value as long as cat people with a tankful o’
kibble desire it,” says an entry on the rare books blog Booktryst.
“The Book of Cats” was, according to that site, “certainly the most
popular and desirable book on cats ever published.” It’s a hard book to
hold on to; editions are steadily being auctioned and bought and sold,
passing from owner to owner, as the price ticks upward.
By
1940, the year Foujita painted “Cat Fight,” the image my friend showed
me, he was back in Japan, painting propaganda posters for the empire.
During this period, my friend said, Foujita grew tortured and depressed,
both by the war and his role in it and by the way he no longer felt at
home in his native land. After the war, he returned to France and was
baptized a Catholic. He said once: “Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.”
It
was when I read that quote from Foujita that I realized: The link
between the artist and the game had very little to do with Japanese
aesthetics and everything to do with the chaos in house cats. I had, at
this point, been trying for days to get a cat named Chairman Meow to
visit my Neko Atsume home. Chairman Meow is a cat with particular
desires. He will visit only if you have left out a certain earthenware
pot. I knew he had stopped by a few times over the last week because I
saw the fish he left behind (he was, I thought, pretty stingy) — but I
hadn’t checked the game in time to catch him while he was around and
take a picture. It was infuriating. I couldn’t stop checking. Why
wouldn’t the Chairman come when I wanted? I’d done everything right! The
pot was out, the food was there. . . .
Ah,
yes. Of course. My problem was that I wanted something from a cat.
Anyone who has cohabited with a cat knows, intuitively, that they are
sort of wild. Cats can’t really be trained. They will push things off
shelves at random. Feral cats make up most of the breeding population,
so despite living alongside humans for some 9,000 years, house cats are
still not fully domesticated.
Neko
Atsume: Kitty Collector is a game that appears to be about collecting
cats. Only you never really collect the cats — merely your photographs
of them, for your Catbook. The cats come, the cats go; maybe you see
them, maybe you don’t. The cats do not care. They have other lives,
other places to be. What brings you back, again and again, is that these
semiwild creatures have decided, temporarily, to share their existence
with you. You cannot collect them, merely the memory of them, for
existence is fleeting and nothing, save for ourselves, is ever entirely
ours.
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