Mornings Without Mii

by Mayumi Inaba, Ginny Tapley Takemori (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Deeply emotional and steeped in the bonds we create, this transcends the core relationship of a cat and their human and explores of what it means to find companionship.

INDIE BESTSELLER

A Must-Read: The New Yorker • Literary Hub • The Millions • Kirkus Reviews • Shelf Awareness • BookBub

“I have never read a book quite like this. [A] profoundly real, specific, moving, and beautifully written story.” ―Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or

“[A] moving memoir . . . [of] the daily joys and intimacies of having a pet . . . Inaba’s portrait of the human-feline relationship is reverential, an expression of devotion.” —The New Yorker

Mornings Without Mii is a beloved Japanese modern classic: a deeply affecting story of solitude, independence, writing, grief, love, and life alongside a cat.

On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze off Tokyo’s Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to the riverbank and finds a newborn kitten only the size of her palm dangling from a fence, abandoned. Overcome by tender affection, she takes the cat back to the small apartment she shares with her husband and christens her Mii: so begins an ineffable bond.

Over the next twenty years, we follow Inaba, a poet and novelist by moonlight, as she pursues quiet, solitude, and a room of her own. Through it all, her cat, a fiercely independent creature in her own right, is her confidante and muse.

From the late Mayumi Inaba, a winner of the Kawabata Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, Mornings Without Mii is not just a love letter to companionship: it’s a poignant, searching meditation on the forces that enable us to connect, to create, and to build a life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374614782
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/25/2025
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Mayumi Inaba (1950–2014) was a prizewinning novelist and poet. Her works include The Sea Staghorn and To the Peninsula, for which she won the Kawabata Yasunari Prize and the Tanizaki Prize.

Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated fiction by more than a dozen early-modern and contemporary Japanese writers. Her translation of Sayaka Murata’s Akutagawa Prize–winning novel Convenience Store Woman was one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2018, was Foyles Book of the Year 2018, and was short-listed for the Indies Choice Award and Best Translated Book Award.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/09/2024

In this soulful account, Inaba (1950–2014) recounts her 20-year relationship with her cat, Mii. After finding an abandoned kitten on a Tokyo fence one evening, Inaba impulsively decided to take it home with her. “Maybe it was because my defenses were down,” she writes. “I set off walking without a second thought.” As financial stresses started to fracture Inaba’s marriage, the author took solace in her pet, pulling herself through drunken nights of self-loathing with “the sight of Mii waiting patiently for me in the dark.” The book’s middle section rapturously recounts Inaba and Mii’s evening walks, their afternoons spent admiring the Tokyo skyline, and, as Mii started to fall ill, their meditative trips to the countryside. As Mii’s life comes to an end, Inaba avoids cliché, cataloging her newfound spiritual resilience instead of wallowing in grief: “My mornings without Mii would start tomorrow,” Inaba writes. “I might weep, but I wouldn’t mourn.” This is a must-read for pet lovers with sturdy hearts. Agent: Bruno Onuki Reynell, New River Literary. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

A meditative memoir about love, grief, writing, and cats. What a lovely book to curl up with this spring.”

—McKayla Coyle, Literary Hub (Most Anticipated Books of 2025)

“[A] resonant slice of Japanese literature . . . A striking evocation of the way we meld our lives and hearts with a beloved creature.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Cat lovers, prepare to weep.”

—Siobhan Murphy, The Times

“Supernaturally insightful and aglow with incidental joys, Mornings Without Mii uncovers something eternal about companionship, about being alone, and about cats.”

—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“[A] soulful account . . . [Mornings Without Mii] rapturously recounts Inaba and Mii’s evening walks, their afternoons spent admiring the Tokyo skyline, and, as Mii started to fall ill, their meditative trips to the countryside . . . A must-read for pet lovers with sturdy hearts.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Marvelous, a cat classic.”

—Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X, on Substack

“A woman writer meditates on solitude, art, and independence alongside her beloved cat in Inaba’s modern classic.”

—Sophia M. Stewart, The Millions

“Heartstring-tugging, haunting . . . Lovingly chronicle[d] . . . Grateful readers will recognize Inaba’s visceral connection and find deep comfort here.”

—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Sure to tug the heartstrings of cat lovers everywhere . . . Profoundly intimate . . . [An] exquisite story, one that is sure to stay with its readers long after they dry their eyes.”

—Christine Runyon, BookBrowse

“This book is more than a tribute to a companion. It’s proof of a world normally concealed from humans, exposed here through the eyes of an artist. Mornings Without Mii captures the otherworldly luck and requisite doom of finding and being found by a cat. I could barely get through it—a compliment.”

—Sloane Crosley, author of Grief Is for People

“[A] bracing and beautiful memoir . . . suffused with honesty and emotional heft.”

—Linda M. Castellitto, BookPage (starred review)

“Unforgettable . . . A profound account of caring for a loved one across their entire life and the privilege such care entails . . . Sweet and timeless.”

—Annie Bostrom, Booklist

“An homage to love and loss in a relationship between a human and an animal.”

—Ellen Prentiss Campbell, Washington Independent Review of Books

“[A] modern classic . . . Ending on [a] note of redemption, the story is full of positive energy. Whatever is happening in the wider world, there is always love, even if it’s not the conventional kind.”

—Jane Wallace, Asian Review of Books

“[Mornings Without Mii] evokes genuine pathos . . . Not only a story of the joy of animal companionship, but also its grief.”

—Thu-Huong Ha, The Japan Times

“I have never read a book quite like this. The profoundly real, specific, moving, and beautifully written story of a woman who becomes a writer and falls in love with a kitten, and then lives with these things—both the writing, and the cat—for the next twenty years. I learned new things about myself and my cat, and also about (some) people and cats in 1970s–1990s Tokyo.”

—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or

From the Publisher

★ 2024-12-14
Not just another Japanese cat book…

“Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck in the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y neighborhood of Fuchu City in western Tokyo.” Ginny Tapley Takemori, the translator of Sayaka Murata’sConvenience Store Woman, brings us another resonant slice of Japanese literature and culture. First published in 1999, this memoir by the poet and novelist Inaba (1950-2014) has long been a classic in its home country. The kitten’s rescue in the late summer of 1977 turned out to be the beginning of a 20-year relationship—one that outlasted the author’s marriage and several jobs and changes of residence—and became entwined with her development as a writer and her life as a single woman. In prose chapters that usually end with a poem, Inaba chronicles Mii’s routines and behavior, her early life with unfettered outdoor access and plenty of “boyfriends,” and then her later years, when the pair lived in a high-rise and Mii suffered a long decline. The accounts of feline health crises, aging, and excretion are unsparingly detailed, but in fact, it’s Inaba’s unabashed descriptions of the physical intimacy between a human and an animal that make the book unique. “Since my husband had left, Mii and I had become closer than ever. Our intimacy was spun without words and in time formed into an unbreakable bond. We slept in the same bed, entrusting our bodies to each other, snuggling together, and in the morning the first thing we saw was each other.” The translation preserves some unfamiliar Japanese words (tsubo, tokonoma), but they add to the vivid sense of place created by the many geographic names and Inaba’s lucid images of the physical world around her: wooded suburb, asphalt cityscape, rugged seaside.

A striking evocation of the way we meld our lives and hearts with a beloved creature.

Kirkus Reviews

I learned new things about myself and my cat, and also about (some) people and cats in 1970s–1990s Tokyo.”

author of Either/Or Elif Batuman

Captures the otherworldly luck and requisite doom of finding and being found by a cat.”

author of Grief Is for People Sloane Crosley

Deeply emotional and steeped in the bonds we create…Explores of what it means to find companionship.”

Barnes&Noble.com