In Japanese, the word "umineko" (海猫) actually means seagull. I only first realized this recently while listening again to the song "Boku ga Shinou to Omotta no wa" (I Also Thought of Ending It All), written by Hiromu Akita and sung by Mika Nakashima. Despite the song's heavy and somber atmosphere, a completely different image popped into my head: a cat swimming in the sea, or a fantastical creature with the head of a cat and the body of a fish.
Cats have a habit of always wanting to squeeze into small boxes, right? So I started to imagine: what if this literal "sea cat" stubbornly tried to crawl into a styrofoam box floating on the ocean, only to get stuck inside? And what if, because it ate so many fish in the sea, its body grew longer and longer? This is how the peculiar "Umi-Hako-Neko" (Sea Box Cat) was born.
While such a scene might be a little pitiful if it happened in real life, I thought it would become rather humorous and cute if turned into a capsule toy. This work is the result of giving form to that imagination.
