Mornings Without Mii

INDIE BESTSELLER Winner of the Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize 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.

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.