'Mornings Without Mii': A cozy cat memoir that gets down in the muck

Beneath the trappings of a cozy cat book is a visceral, no-holds-barred account of devotion.

“Mornings Without Mii,” Mayumi Inaba’s 1999 memoir, translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is available in the U.S. this month. The 192-page book charts the course of the author’s 20-year relationship with her cat, Mii, named after her high-pitched cries of mii-mii.

Mornings Without Mii, by Mayumi Inaba. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. 192 pages, MACMILLAN, Nonfiction.

Inaba was a Yasunari Kawabata Prize and Tanizaki Junichiro Prize-winning writer, poet and editor who passed away in 2014. In her memoir, she describes the day in 1977 when she found a tiny calico kitten stuck in the hole of a school fence on the banks of the Tama River in western Tokyo. Inaba rescued the kitten and brought her home, and Mii became the author’s companion until she died in 1997.

The book is written simply and prone to the sentimental. “I hadn’t been able to live with another person, but living with Mii I had become sensitive to the smell and the presence of the breeze over the seasons, the warmth of the light,” Inaba writes. “Our intimacy was spun without words and in time formed into an unbreakable bond,” she says as they share a bed. In the same way that readers may grow weary of a human love story that’s all sunshine and rainbows, these treacly passages can grate.

But if the reader can look past the warm fuzzies, the memoir takes some surprising turns toward the unflinching, even grisly, and evokes genuine pathos beyond the standard feline-centered “healing fiction.”

The first time Mii goes into heat, Inaba assumes the role of a parent desperate to protect her budding adolescent from the neighborhood boys. “‘He’s here again, that fatso.’ He was so ugly I never dreamed that Mii would fall for him,” the author says of the male cat Mii chooses as a mate.

The relationship between the two shifts naturally through the years: Inaba is initially a parent and Mii her child; later Inaba refers to Mii as her partner; and by Mii’s final years, Inaba has become a child caring for an aging or sick elder. “Before going to bed I was now checking Mii’s bottom, amount of earwax, the color and luster of her paw beans, eyes, hip bones, urine, feces, and so forth. I inspected everything, the amount of food she ate, the amount of water she drank,” writes Inaba of the diminished Mii.

The unquestioning sacrifice with which the author dedicates herself to Mii doesn’t reflect a reciprocal relationship between two adults, but the codependence feels as real as between any humans.

In the U.S., the book is called “Mornings Without Mii,” which is close to the original “Mii no Inai Asa,” but in the U.K., where the book was released in March 2024, it’s sold as “Mornings With My Cat Mii.” The difference is telling. The titles seem to be obverses of each other, but both are true; the book takes place largely “with” Mii, yet there is an anxiety that pervades the latter half of the memoir that hints at impending loss. By the end of the book we understand this is not only a story of the joy of animal companionship, but also its grief.