Harvill Secker wins nine-way auction for 'Japanese modern classic' Mornings With My Cat Mii

Harvill Secker has won a nine-way auction for Mornings With My Cat Mii, billed as “the perfect gift for cat lovers and a beloved Japanese modern classic”. 

The book chronicles the late poet Mayumi Inaba’s 20-year bond with her cat, meditating on solitude, independence, companionship, the writing life, and how cats can change our lives.

Senior editor Ellie Steel acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Li Kangqin at New River Literary Agency on behalf of Kohei Hattori at the English Agency Japan and Kawade Shobō Shinsha. Harvill Secker will publish in October 2024, and FSG will publish in the US. 

The book opens on a late summer’s evening in 1977, with Mii abandoned as a tiny kitten, stuffed through a chain-link fence by a riverbank in Tokyo. "Mayumi hears her plaintive meows sweeping up on the breeze, goes to find her, rescues her and takes her home. So begins a new life for them both", the publisher said.

Mornings With My Cat Mii follows their 20 years together through the seasons, as Mayumi develops her career as a writer, and finds her feet in life, with her small feline at her side. It is now translated into English for the first time by Ginny Tapley Takemori.  

Steel said: “Mornings With My Cat Mii is full of love, with beautifully described moments of everyday joys and dramas, and a poet’s eye on their surroundings and Mayumi and Mii’s life together. It’s a timeless, moving and tender portrait of companionship, that celebrates the essential bond so many of us experience with our cats over the course of a lifetime, and the importance of caring for each other and treasuring our time together.”

Mayumi Inaba died in 2014.