Overview

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.

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9798228309913

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Reviews

""As financial stresses started to fracture Inaba's marriage, the author took solace in her pet...As Mii's life comes to an end, Inaba avoids cliché, cataloging her newfound spiritual resilience instead of wallowing in grief."" -- ""Publishers Weekly (starred review)"" ""Captures the otherworldly luck and requisite doom of finding and being found by a cat."" -- ""Sloane Crosley, author of Grief Is for People"" ""Deeply emotional and steeped in the bonds we create...Explores of what it means to find companionship."" -- ""Barnes&Noble.com"" ""I learned new things about myself and my cat, and also about (some) people and cats in 1970s-1990s Tokyo."" -- ""Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or"" ""The translation preserves some unfamiliar Japanese words (tsubo, tokonoma), but they add to the vivid sense of place created by the many geographic names and Inaba's lucid images of the physical world around her: wooded suburb, asphalt cityscape, rugged seaside....A striking evocation of the way we meld our lives and hearts with a beloved creature."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews (starred review)""

Author Information

Mayumi Inaba (1950-2014) was a prizewinning novelist and poet. In addition to Mornings Without Mii, her works include The Sea Staghorn and To the Peninsula, for which she won the Kawabata Prize and the Tanizaki Prize. Nancy Wu has narrated audiobooks since 2004, winning three AudioFile Earphones Awards. A New York theater, television, and film actor, she has recorded in studios all over the world--from Italy to Switzerland to Thailand. Her credits include Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Hope & Faith, All My Children, Made for Each Other, and the Oscar-nominated film Frozen River. Ginny Tapley Takemori is the award-winning translator of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and other works of contemporary Japanese literature. She lives in rural Japan with her husband and three cats.

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