The Cat Who Went to Heaven
by Elizabeth Coatsworth
Summary
A poor Japanese artist lives so close to the edge of hunger that when his housekeeper spends their last coins on a small calico cat instead of food, he can barely afford to be angry about it, and he names the animal Good Fortune once he notices her three colors, traditionally considered lucky. Good Fortune's arrival coincides with the artist's biggest commission yet, a temple painting of the dying Buddha surrounded by every animal that came to honor him at the end, and as he works through the traditional cast of creatures one by one, the housekeeper's own songs comment on each animal's place in the story between chapters. Good Fortune longs, with an intensity the artist comes to recognize as real feeling rather than mere vanity, to be included among the mourning animals in the painting, even though the temple's tradition holds that cats are excluded because a cat alone refused to bow before the Buddha long ago. Moved by her devotion, the artist breaks tradition and adds a small white cat to the finished painting anyway, and Good Fortune, seeing herself included at last, dies peacefully of what the story frames as pure joy. The priests are furious when they discover the addition and plan to burn the painting rather than display a heresy, but overnight the picture itself changes, the painted Buddha's hand now extended in blessing over the small cat, a miracle the priests accept as proof the artist and his cat were right all along.
Coatsworth interweaves this slim narrative with the housekeeper's poems and with retellings of stories from the Jataka tales about the Buddha's own earlier animal lives, giving the book a devotional, storytelling within storytelling structure rather than a single straight narrative line. It reads quickly, closer to an illustrated parable than a novel, gentle and a little melancholy throughout, and it asks very little patience from a young reader while still carrying real weight in its central idea of faith and exclusion.
Historical Context & Significance
Macmillan published The Cat Who Went to Heaven in 1930, illustrated by Lynd Ward, and it won the 1931 Newbery Medal. No committee citation survives from this era, but that year's runners up included Anne Parrish's Floating Island, Ralph Hubbard's Queer Person and Elizabeth Janet Gray's Meggy MacIntosh. Coatsworth based the story loosely on an old Buddhist folk tale, working Jataka material about the Buddha's earlier lives into her own frame narrative about the artist and his cat.
The book has stayed continuously available since, short enough to be read in a single sitting, and it entered the public domain in the United States at the start of 2026, which opens it to new editions after decades of circulating mainly through older library copies.