Cat town - a fantasy in the manner of a prose poem

The title refers to Hagiwara Sakutaro's 1935 prose poem 'Nekomachi' (Cat Town), a hallucinatory narrative in which the inhabitants of a provincial town reveal themselves to the narrator as cats. Kawakami's literary engagement here demonstrates his connection to the modernist literary circles of early Showa Japan and his place within a printmaking tradition that frequently illustrated contemporary texts. The composition likely depicts a townscape populated by feline figures, rendered with his characteristic flat-color folk-art directness rather than the psychological realism that the poem itself cultivates. Cats recur throughout Kawakami's work, often appearing alongside lamps and Western objects in interior scenes that border on the dreamlike. The combination of literary allusion, urban setting, and feline subject places this print at the intersection of his interests in modernist text, vernacular pictorial imagery, and the playful subversion of conventional subject hierarchies. The graphic flatness suits the unsettling logic of Hagiwara's text, where the ordinary slips into the uncanny without warning.