Mornings Without Mii
by Mayumi Inaba
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Pub Date Feb 25 2025 | Archive Date Mar 25 2025
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | FSG Originals
Description
A beloved Japanese modern classic that chronicles the author’s twenty-year bond with her cat, meditating on solitude, independence, and the writing life.
On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze of Tokyo’s Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to find a newborn kitten, just 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, and so begins an ineffable bond.
Over the next twenty years, we follow Inaba, a poet and novelist by moonlight, through a lifetime of choices and compromises made in pursuit of quiet, solitude, and a space to create. Through it all, her cat, a formidably independent creature in her own right, is her confidante and muse.
From the late Mayumi Inaba, the winner of the Kawabata Yasunari Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, Mornings Without Mii is more than a love letter to feline companionship—it is a probing, stirring meditation on the forces that enable us to connect, to create, and to build a life.
A Note From the Publisher
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.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374614782 |
| PRICE | $17.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 192 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Edie C, Reviewer
Mornings Without Mii is the memoir of a writer's life with her cat. That is the entire story. And yet within those parameters there is an entire world of love and longing, of living in and without nature, of relationships and responsibilities. Although covering completely different ground, the book this most reminds me of is Jill Ciment's memoir from earlier this year, Consent. Both books are alarmingly honest glimpses into the authors' lives - impossibly vulnerable details delivered in clear, concise language. I found both books devastatingly brutal and beautifully loving at the same time. Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the eARC.
In one sense, this memoir was a difficult read. I am not sure if it was the translation or the author's writing style, but I struggled at times with the language. I do not share a cultural context with Mayumi Inaba, I had to work to understand the time and place she describes. These are not negatives in my mind. I think reading should challenge us at times. Sure, I love a fluffy comfort read now and again. But I also like books which stretch me in new and interesting ways. There were off-hand observations I found utterly appalling, and beautiful turns of phrases I rolled around on my tongue to savor. Any effort I put into the book was richly rewarded. In another sense, this was an easy read. It is short and much of it covers ground familiar to anyone who has loved a pet.
I treasured this glimpse into a life so different from my own.
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