Mornings Without Mii

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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.