Mornings Without Mii

By: Mayumi Inaba

Narrated by: Nancy Wu

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.

©1999 Yuji Hirano. Translation © 2024 by Ginny Tapley Takemori (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing

I love cats, too, but…

To say the author bonded with her cat is an understatement. This was a book about obsessive compulsive behavior and I found the vivid descriptions of keeping a sick cat alive for months and months a strange way for the author to show her love.

Bad writing

I just couldn’t care about the authors story. It’s a hackneyed story told in uninspiring prose I wish there had been more about the cat. I’d like my money back.