INDIE BESTSELLER 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.
