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.”