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Mornings Without Mii
- Author
- Mayumi Inaba
- Narrator
- Nancy Wu
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 25 February 2025
- Run Time
- 4 hours 53 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
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.
Critics Review
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“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)
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“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)
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“Deeply emotional and steeped in the bonds we create…Explores of what it means to find companionship.”
Barnes&Noble.com
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“Captures the otherworldly luck and requisite doom of finding and being found by a cat.”
Sloane Crosley, author of Grief Is for People
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“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
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Mayumi Inaba
- Narrator
- Nancy Wu
- Duration
- 4 hours 53 minutes
- Release Date
- 25 February 2025
- ISBN
- 9798228309951
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Memoirs, Cats as pets, Biography: general, Anthologies: general
Synopsis
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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