Mornings Without Mii

Starred review from December 9, 2024
In this soulful account, Inaba (1950–2014) recounts her 20-year relationship with her cat, Mii. After finding an abandoned kitten on a Tokyo fence one evening, Inaba impulsively decided to take it home with her. “Maybe it was because my defenses were down,” she writes. “I set off walking without a second thought.” As financial stresses started to fracture Inaba’s marriage, the author took solace in her pet, pulling herself through drunken nights of self-loathing with “the sight of Mii waiting patiently for me in the dark.” The book’s middle section rapturously recounts Inaba and Mii’s evening walks, their afternoons spent admiring the Tokyo skyline, and, as Mii started to fall ill, their meditative trips to the countryside. As Mii’s life comes to an end, Inaba avoids cliché, cataloging her newfound spiritual resilience instead of wallowing in grief: “My mornings without Mii would start tomorrow,” Inaba writes. “I might weep, but I wouldn’t mourn.” This is a must-read for pet lovers with sturdy hearts. Agent: Bruno Onuki Reynell, New River Literary.

Starred review from January 15, 2025
Not just another Japanese cat book... "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." Ginny Tapley Takemori, the translator of Sayaka Murata'sConvenience Store Woman, brings us another resonant slice of Japanese literature and culture. First published in 1999, this memoir by the poet and novelist Inaba (1950-2014) has long been a classic in its home country. The kitten's rescue in the late summer of 1977 turned out to be the beginning of a 20-year relationship--one that outlasted the author's marriage and several jobs and changes of residence--and became entwined with her development as a writer and her life as a single woman. In prose chapters that usually end with a poem, Inaba chronicles Mii's routines and behavior, her early life with unfettered outdoor access and plenty of "boyfriends," and then her later years, when the pair lived in a high-rise and Mii suffered a long decline. The accounts of feline health crises, aging, and excretion are unsparingly detailed, but in fact, it's Inaba's unabashed descriptions of the physical intimacy between a human and an animal that make the book unique. "Since my husband had left, Mii and I had become closer than ever. Our intimacy was spun without words and in time formed into an unbreakable bond. We slept in the same bed, entrusting our bodies to each other, snuggling together, and in the morning the first thing we saw was each other." 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.

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February 1, 2025
In a memoir full of unforgettable images, Japanese writer Inaba (1950-2014) opens her story with a particularly indelible one. On a summer day in 1977, she followed a faint mewing sound coming from uphill in her Tokyo neighborhood and found a tiny kitten stuck in a chain-link fence. As for how the small sound even reached her, ""perhaps by some ghostly chance the breeze from the river had a magical power that night."" Published in 1999 and now translated into English for the first time, Inaba's memoir of cat companionship chronicles 20 years in their two dovetailing lives. Mii roams wildly, has a frightening first pregnancy, and eventually adjusts to life as an indoor cat. Meanwhile Inaba undergoes difficult housing searches (few places accept cats), ends her marriage, and sees her first published work. Inaba's flexible writing and tight focus mean readers will walk away with both a very specific portrait of Mii and a profound account of caring for a loved one across their entire life and the privilege such care entails. A sweet and timeless act of honoring.

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