Mornings Without MII

It was summer 1977 when Mayumi Inaba first met Mii, “a teeny tiny baby kitten” stuck in a high fence on the banks of Tokyo’s Tamagawa River. Inaba stretched up to rescue her, brought her home and, as she reveals in her bracing and beautiful memoir, Mornings Without Mii, set in motion a 20-year relationship deeper and more meaningful than she ever could’ve anticipated. Mornings Without Mii—first published in 1999, now translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori—is a beloved classic in Japan, and Inaba, a poet and novelist who died in 2014, was awarded numerous prestigious prizes for her work. But her writing practice didn’t fully take form until after she opened her life to the calico cat. The fluffy little helpmeet stays by her side through a divorce, as she moves to multiple homes and during the blossoming of her literary career. In prose and poetry, Inaba earnestly and affectionately describes her enduring fascination with Mii, noting, “Whenever I saw a new expression on her face, I wanted to keep gazing at it until I tired of it.” Mii even inspires Inaba to purchase her first camera, because “it was no longer enough for me to follow [Mii’s] development with my eyes alone.” Mii is also the impetus for the author’s early-1980s home purchase after yet another round of rental-hunting leaves her frustrated: “How impoverished this huge wonderful energized city called Tokyo was by the fact it had nowhere where humans and cats could live together!” The high-rise apartment lacks the greenery and space the duo had grown used to, but they establish a new routine: Every night, Inaba takes breaks from her writing to roam their building’s hallways and parking lot with Mii. When Mii’s health declines, Inaba tends to her in the apartment, an experience she recalls in unsparing detail as she reflects on the cat’s suffering and her own grief, tempered by gratitude for their time together. Suffused with honesty and emotional heft, Mornings Without Mii will resonate with readers who’ve communed with beloved pets like Inaba did with Mii: “Our intimacy was spun without words and in time formed into an unbreakable bond.”