I want to talk about the number of cats on book covers, and in particular, the number of cats on book covers by Japanese authors in Western bookshops.

It’s gotten to the point where every time I walk into a bookshop, I find entire bookshelves filled with this kind of cover. I’m sure you’ve seen them. The books feature a cozy cover with a calm setting, a library, cafe or cherry blossom park. In the background is a person or two, and in the foreground, somewhere, is a cat. The books have names like The Full Moon Coffee Shop, She and Her Cat and The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop. They are translations from the Japanese, and they are bestsellers.

My guilty confession is that I’ve read some of these books. Not only that. I believe they tell us something very important about the cultural moment we are living in. I believe they tell us that the culture is responding to crisis with the manufacturing of calm. 

Each of these books are designed and marketed to western audiences, and the covers are an intentional design choice. If you pick up one of these books, they seem to say, you know what you’re getting yourself into. This is a quaint story. It is a reprieve from the chaos of the world. If you’re lucky, it might even be an affirmation of the meaning of life.

This is the philosophy of the Japanese cat book.

One of the first books of this genre I read is Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. The front cover features a cafe’s table, bright colours, and a cat. The book is a time-traveling novel about a cafe where people travel back in time to a specific point in the past. The catch is that the person must time travel and come back before, you guessed it, their coffee gets cold. 

Now, I will say from the outset that there is nothing bad about the book. I liked it as a simple story. Indeed, most books in this genre are not bad from a technical standpoint. The English translations feature crisp prose that in part, due to being translations, have a sense of freshness to them. 

They also have that meandering character that Japanese stories often have, that is so easy to fall in love with. What I mean is a discursive plot that tangents in a manner unacceptable in western fiction. This makes the stories feel ghostly and somewhat other-worldly. There is a lot of fog, and characters disappearing, and strange everyday magic which might be real or might be perception.

But to me, the interesting point about these books is not so much the books themselves but their popularity. Why do we need so many cozy books right now? What is happening in our culture that demands cozy books as the response? Why are people reading these books so much when reading is in decline?

The answer is the state of the world.

Look around.

As chaos engulfs much of the western world, with chaotic politics, high prices for goods, wars and disasters… there is a sense of things unraveling. There is a feeling that the center will not hold, that all we cherish is on the brink. The people who are meant to lead us are asleep at the wheel or worse, steering us off the cliff. There is a desire for someone to save us. But no one is coming, and so we weather the storm.

That is why we see an explosion in all things “cozy.” From cozy books to cozy video games… we are grasping for cultural experiences that act as pressure release valves, to undo the tension inside our shoulder blades. In the video game context, we are reaching for experiences without combat, without survival, without the frenetic pace of life.

Instead we go for – farming simulators, of all things. 

Stardew Valley (2016), the pinnacle of the cozy genre in video games, is a tranquil (if idealized), portrayal of rural life. You play as a farmer in a small village. The gameplay consists of planting crops, petting animals and befriending the locals. (This is not the violent video game your parents warned you about).

The simple farming simulator has proven extremely popular. It has spawned a legion of successor titles by indie game studios catering to the demand for cozy gameplay. The market wants cozy things.

Japanese cat books are no different. They are not tethered to reality either. The books are not accurate reflections of Japan. They feature no politics, no social upheaval, no chaos of war or death. They avoid World War Two, the Fukushima nuclear disaster or indeed, anything bad at all. They are idealised and fictionalised slices of life that appeal to a sense of wonder with the everyday. They are a neutered representation of form, a form of life with the edges hemmed off. They are Japan made palatable to western eyes.

A fitting example here is Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, one of the most popular of the genre. The book tells the story of a woman working in a convenience store and the marriage of convenience (pun intended) she proposes to a man there. The store is the fulcrum of the story. Merely with the setting itself, the story glorifies a working-class lifestyle.

Meanwhile, What You’re Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, tells the story of a group of people finding answers to their life problems in a library. Yes, that’s basically it.

Finally, Hot Chocolate on Thursday (also Aoyama) tells the story of a lady going to the same cafe every week to drink hot chocolate as served by a waiter. Yes, literally, it’s that simple.

Looking at these books makes me feel sad, if not wistful. I think there is a longing in our culture filtered through the popularity of these books. It’s a longing for a simpler time when things were more certain. The artificiality with which we imbue cozy things with a sense of normalcy and wonder while hawing off the negatives… (Stardew Valley has none of the hard labor or death of farm life; people have to work on Thursdays and can’t go to cafes all day; there are no magic cats in the library). It makes me think we have lost that wonder in our daily lives. Maybe we are grappling for that wonder in fiction.

What worries me is that if everyone is escaping into their own fictional fantasies, no one is building community. No one is making the space that makes the fantastic real. If “cozy” is the philosophy of the 2020s, then it tells us of a society in retreat. It’s a society looking for warm places, for shelter, for a place to call home.

When one of these books came up in my local book club, it got me thinking about this whole genre. Maybe what we are looking for is not in the library after all. Maybe what we’re looking for has been there in front of us this whole time.

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