Mayumi Inaba

The perfect gift for cat lovers: a beloved Japanese modern classic that chronicles the author's twenty-year bond with her cat, meditating on solitude, independence, companionship, the writing life, and how cats can change our lives. For the last 20 years, Japanese readers have been falling in love with the late poet and prizewinning author Mayumi Inaba's story of life with her cat Mii, after she rescued her as a newborn kitten from a riverbank in Tokyo. The book follows their everyday joys through the seasons, as Mayumi develops her career as a writer, and finds her feet in life, with her small feline always at her side. Translated into English for the first time by world-renowned translator Ginny Tapley Takemori, Mornings With My Cat Mii is set to capture the hearts and imaginations of readers and booksellers everywhere.

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.