This charming children's story focuses on two cats who appear first as playmates for a beautiful court lady. They are seen enjoying courtly pleasures such as a moonlight serenade. Soon the cats appear in anthropomorphic form, dressed as nuns or courtiers. The grand finale is a lavish cat wedding.

The miniature scale and finely detailed black and white technique, a kind of grisaille known as hakubyo (literally, white drawing), were favored by amateur painters, usually women, during the Muromachi period. By the seventeenth century the technique was often used by professionals as well.