Mornings Without Mii
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
INDIE BESTSELLER
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year So Far
A Must-Read: Literary Hub • The Millions • Kirkus Reviews • Shelf Awareness • BookPage • BookBub
“A great love story.” —Sigrid Nunez, The New Yorker
“I have never read a book quite like this. Profoundly real, specific, moving, and beautifully written.” ―Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
