Charlotte Shane at Bookforum:
WHEN THE WRITER MAYUMI INABA meets Mii, the kitten who will become “the center of her life,” the animal is stuck in a school fence, screaming for rescue in the night air: a “little white dot” deposited there “out of malice or mischief” by a culprit long departed. There is no sign of her mother or littermates, no evidence that she is owned or loved or named. She is flea-bitten, only a few days old, exhausted, and of obscure origin. “All I knew,” Inaba writes of the moment she collected this defenseless being into her hands, “was that she must have felt utterly desperate.” Any cat person worth their fur-covered clothes can guess what happens next; Inaba is subsumed in devotion to this creature, with its face “the size of a coin.” Her life will be ruled by Mii until Mii’s own life ends, and that is right and good.
Cat people are the only conceivable audience for Mornings Without Mii, an uneventful memoir in which a Japanese woman—married at the beginning of the book, later divorced—loves and lives with a cat who succumbs to old age. Who else would be entertained by meticulous descriptions of Mii sleeping, playing in newspapers, sniffing everything she comes across, lapping up milk?
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