KyuryuZ is an illustrator and artist who posts "original cat manga" on his Twitter account.

Earlier this month, in a Tweet which has over 210,000 likes at the time of writing, he posted a manga relating a mystifying incident from five years earlier which happened soon after welcoming his as-yet-unnamed cat into his home.

As his younger sister was taking pictures of their new feline friend, a surprising message suddenly appeared on her smartphone...

Barcode Cat

Note: Translations are ours. Neko-chan is an affectionate term for cat.

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The sister apparently thought that the phone interpreted the fur pattern on the cat's head as a QR code, but of course, the code did not contain any meaningful information. However, it did yield the inspiration for the cat's name, Kyuruga!

QR codes were originally invented by Denso Wave in 1994 to track vehicles during manufacturing. Little could the engineers imagine that a QR code scan would one day activate on a cat!

The manga elicited comments such as:

• "So your cat was a QR code..."
• "What an IT whiz cat!"
• "Maybe if you read his QR code, you can find out what he's thinking."

According to KyuruZ, "This story is about the smartphone I was using five years ago, and now when I try scanning my cat with my phone, it doesn't recognize any two-dimensional codes."

However, in case anyone doubts his story, he posted the following screen capture of his sister's phone at the time as proof.

We know that it was just a coincidence that the phone reacted to the pattern on the cat's fur, but wouldn't it be nice if we really could read our pets' emotions by scanning them?

By the way, for those who are curious, you can try scanning the code in the manga above and see what happens!

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If you'd like to read more of KyuruZ's manga and see cute photos of Kyuruga in his natural habitat, you can follow KyuruZ on Twitter here.