Mornings Without Mii
by Mayumi Inaba
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Feb 25 2025 | Archive Date Mar 25 2025
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | FSG Originals
Description
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.
A Note From the Publisher
Mayumi Inaba (1950–2014) was a prizewinning novelist and poet. Her works include The Sea Staghorn and To the Peninsula, for which she won the Kawabata Yasunari Prize and the Tanizaki Prize.
Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated fiction by more than a dozen early-modern and contemporary Japanese writers. Her translation of Sayaka Murata’s Akutagawa Prize–winning novel Convenience Store Woman was one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2018, was Foyles Book of the Year 2018, and was short-listed for the Indies Choice Award and Best Translated Book Award.
Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated fiction by more than a dozen early-modern and contemporary Japanese writers. Her translation of Sayaka Murata’s Akutagawa Prize–winning novel Convenience Store Woman was one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2018, was Foyles Book of the Year 2018, and was short-listed for the Indies Choice Award and Best Translated Book Award.
Advance Praise
“Mornings Without Mii is a meditative memoir about love, grief, writing, and cats. What a lovely book to curl up with this spring.” —McKayla Coyle, Literary Hub (Most Anticipated Books of 2025)
“A woman writer meditates on solitude, art, and independence alongside her beloved cat in Inaba’s modern classic—a book so squarely up my alley I’m somehow embarrassed.” —Sophia M. Stewart, The Millions (Most Anticipated Books of Winter 2025)
“[A] gentle, meditative narrative . . . Cat lovers, prepare to weep.” —Siobhan Murphy, The Times (London)
★ “[A] resonant slice of Japanese literature . . . It’s Inaba’s unabashed descriptions of the physical intimacy between a human and an animal that make the book unique . . . A striking evocation of the way we meld our lives and hearts with a beloved creature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ “[A] soulful account . . . [Mornings Without Mii] 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 . . . This is a must-read for pet lovers with sturdy hearts.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This book is more than a tribute to a companion. It’s proof of a world normally concealed from humans, exposed here through the eyes of an artist. Mornings Without Mii captures the otherworldly luck and requisite doom of finding and being found by a cat. I could barely get through it. A compliment.” —Sloane Crosley, author of Grief is for People
“I have never read a book quite like this. The profoundly real, specific, moving, and beautifully written story of a woman who becomes a writer and falls in love with a kitten, and then lives with these things—both the writing, and the cat—for the next twenty years. 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
“Supernaturally insightful and aglow with incidental joys, Mornings Without Mii uncovers something eternal about companionship, about being alone, and about cats.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
“Marvelous, a cat classic.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X (on Substack)
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374614782 |
| PRICE | $17.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 192 |
Available on NetGalley
Average rating from 38 members
Readers who liked this book also liked:
Sophie Hannah; Agatha Christie
General Fiction (Adult), Historical Fiction, Mystery & Thrillers
Carine Laforest;
Children's Fiction
© 2025 NetGalley LLC
• All Rights Reserved
