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Book Reviewed by:A beloved Japanese modern classic: a meditation on solitude, independence, writing, 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.
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Our First Place
It was the end of summer, 1977. At least I think it was late summer. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny tiny baby kitten.
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.
What direction was the wind blowing that night? It was most likely a gentle breeze blowing up to my house from the river. I followed her cries as they carried on this breeze. At first I searched the gaps in the hedge around my house and in among the weeds of the empty plots on my street. But her cries were coming from high up, not low down. I looked up and suddenly saw a little white dot.
The large expanse of the school grounds was shrouded in the dim light. Before me was a high fence separating the road and the school. Somebody must have shoved the kitten into the fence. She was hanging ...
Inaba's tone is straightforward and profoundly intimate, warmly inviting readers to witness the deep joy and creative solitude life with Mii provided. You truly feel welcome on their nightly walks through the apartment complex, a routine devised to comfort Mii after her separation from the outdoors. It was a strange sort of comfort reading Mornings Without Mii as my own 15-year-old cat Deckard's life waned, with him passing just as I passed the midpoint of the book. I was feeling exactly what Inaba felt, knew her immeasurable pain without knowing it truly at all. What a beautiful thing, to reach back beyond the years to a writer who's now one of your favorites and cry and nod along to her words in understanding. Mornings Without Mii is a tribute not only to the personal pain of caring for another so deeply and losing them, but also the power of writing...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Christine Runyon).
Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or
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. Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
Supernaturally insightful and aglow with incidental joys, Mornings Without Mii uncovers something eternal about companionship, about being alone, and about cats.
Japanese people have been writing about cats for a long time. In 889, Japanese Emperor Uda wrote in his journal: "Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat." He proceeded to then describe the animal in thoughtful detail, including a humorous remark that will resonate all too well with cat owners: "I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long."
Japanese culture is suffused with cats. Assistant Professor of Animal Ecology at Seinan Gakuin University Yamane Akihiro has posited that cats are especially popular in Japan because of their fiercely independent nature:
"I think that behind this affection for cats is the way that present-day Japanese society makes people feel trapped ... People ...
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