Animals feature prominently in Kafka’s fiction, yet cats only make two major appearances in his works. In both stories, written between 1917 and 1920, the cat once ends the short-lived “A Little Fable” (1931/1971) and another time becomes a part of a hybrid mashup of sorts, a strange Cat-Lamb that emerges and affirms the Kafkaesque Oedipal triangle in the short story “A Crossbreed” (1931/1971). However, contemporary connections between Franz Kafka’s work and cats are manifold and continue to infiltrate the sphere of the popular: the Japanese novel Kafka on the Shore (2002) by Haruki Murakami, the Hungarian novel Kafka’s Cats by Gábor T. Szántó (2014) and a recent Philippian short story “I am Kafka, a Cat” by Roy Vadíl Aragon (2021) attest to this global, cross-cultural cat-attraction. What is at stake in the seemingly ‘fun’ idea of ‘modding’ Franz Kafka’s work with catcontent? And why did Kafka never extensively write about cats? This article will highlight transitional potentials of Kafka adaptations – their ‘meta-morphing’ affordances, so to speak – by using an interesting case in point: Coleridge Cook’s mashup novel The Meowmorphosis (2011).
