INDIE BESTSELLER 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.
