Mornings Without Mii [Paperback]

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Winner of the Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize

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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 ofEither/Or

Mornings Without Miiis 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 Tokyos 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 Miiis not just a love letter to companionship: its a poignant, searching meditation on the forces that enable us to connect, to create, and to build a life.

Mayumi Inaba(19502014) was a prizewinning novelist and poet. Her works includeThe Sea StaghornandTo the Peninsula, for which she won the Kawabata Yasunari Prize and the Tanizaki Prize.

Ginny Tapley Takemorihas translated fiction by more than a dozen early-modern and conlc