Channel J: The Battle Royale Children’s Book From 1928

I’m sure most of us by now are aware of the genre of video game known as the battle royale.  A quantity of players drop into a zone and must gather up supplies that will help keep themselves alive while also help them eliminate everyone else.  In order to prevent the match from taking too long, the battle arena gradually shrinks, forcing everyone into a smaller and smaller play area until interacting with one another is inevitable.  Last one standing wins.

The origins of the genre are considered to be relatively recent, taking a lot of inspiration (and its name) from a Japanese movie from 2000 called Battle Royale, and the movie is based on a novel published the year prior.

As a side note, that’s quite an impressive production schedule for the movie.

In the couple decades since the release of the film, the idea of people being forced to battle to the death in order to be the last man standing has inspired many other novels including The Hunger Games, and television shows like Juni Taisen and the recently released Squid Game.  But what if I told you that I grew up with a children’s picture book which contains one of the earliest examples of a battle to the death where there could be only one victor?

In that sense, you could also say that the Highlander series, starting as a movie in 1986, involves a battle royale style conflict that spans centuries, with the end goal of “there can be only one.”  This movie existed almost a decade and a half before Battle Royale, but the book I’m thinking of existed many decades earlier.

Written and illustrated by Wanda Gág in 1928, Millions of Cats is a story of an elderly couple who want to adopt a kitten, for they’re very lonely and I guess their children have long since moved out and started lives of their own.  Although animal shelters existed since the 1800s, the setting of the story makes it appear that the elderly couple live in the countryside, far away from most people.  This is probably why their children moved out.  In the story, they’re a nameless couple, for it likely doesn’t matter what their names are.  When Wanda Gág wrote it, she probably didn’t feel it necessary to give them names.  This lends the story a kind of fable or fairy tale feel, like this is one of the Old Stories.

The husband volunteers to go in search of a cat to keep them company, and so he searches.  He searches high and low and eventually comes across a large colony of cats.

These cats, as far as I can tell, have lived together for so long, they’ve basically become a countless mob.  They’ve also survived independent from humans, but are apparently docile enough that when an elderly man arrives to take one home, they let him.

Unfortunately, there are so many cats that he has trouble deciding on just one.  They are all very aesthetically pleasing cats, and he can’t bring himself to leave them all behind.  This leads to him inviting them all along.  I’ve heard of crazy cat ladies, but he’s a crazy cat guy.

The problem with trying to take care of millions of cats is that they become a huge drain on resources.  On his way home, he watches the cats drink a pond dry and graze on grass until they clear out an entire hill.  Even as they basically scorch the earth behind them, the man doesn’t realize that they aren’t going to be able to take care of them all.

His wife, however, subverts the crazy cat lady trope and has the good sense to point out that they’ll never have enough food and water to sustain millions of cats.  With the wisdom of Solomon, she suggests that the cats should decide which of them should stay.  And so the millions of cats who had presumably lived in harmony up until that point start to argue amongst themselves about who is the prettiest.  This leads to actual, physical fighting and the cats become so fierce that the married couple flee indoors.

They don’t witness what happens to the cats, but when the noise dies down, they can’t find a single one.  There isn’t any evidence they were even there, it’s as if the cats despawned once they died, but to a pair of elderly people living in 1928, it seems that the cats have eaten each other up until none are left.  To be fair, they probably didn’t realize that this wasn’t physically possible, that there would have to be some cats still alive, even just one.

Sure enough, the couple does find a frightened kitten, one who claims a homeliness that prevented it from speaking up in the first place, so it avoided the fight entirely.  The couple take the kitten in, feed it and clean it up and eventually it grows into a cat who is more beautiful than any of the other cats had been.

But here’s the thing: if the cats had somehow killed and eaten each other, at least one of the cats would have to have been killed by this timid kitten.  This leads me to assume that the cats did indeed despawn when they were killed, leaving no trace behind.  The kitten was too underfed to have eaten any of the other cats.

Given it’s a children’s book, it’s likely the feline battle royale is a G-rated, bloodless affair, and with that in mind, there’s more to this kitten than meets the eye.  It could’ve just been an act: the kitten pretends to be timid, but it manages to take out several other cats during the battle and, being the last to survive, puts on an act for the elderly couple.

Another thought is that the kitten really is as weak and frightened as it first appears and it only kills the last cat while it’s weak, and this makes it even more frightened because actually killing something else, something which could’ve killed it, is scary.

Whatever the kitten’s story really is, it’s the winner of the very first modern style battle royale, and the prize is adoption into a good home.  It’s also probably the biggest battle royale ever, with the book’s text repeating over and over that there are “Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats.”  No single movie, television show or piece of software has been able to compare to the number of participants present in Millions of Cats.

Millions of Cats was published in 1928 and was the recipient of a Newbery Honor in 1929.  It was a staple of my childhood, so it’s interesting that I never got into battle royale video games.  It lacked the shrinking battle arena that the genre developed, but I don’t think it was necessary in this case.  None of the cats seemed to flee the battle except, presumably, the timid kitten.

The book continues to be published to this day, although copyright law is soon going to catch up to it.  It’s set to enter the public domain in 2024, assuming the law doesn’t get changed again.  I think the biggest irony here is that the world’s first modern style battle royale will soon, finally be free to play after 95 years!