Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba

  If you’ve ever had a pet, you’ve probably felt gratitude for how they’ve been there for you during any number of significant moments in your life. The memories we form alongside our pets have a special place in us, so it makes sense that Mayumi Inaba grounds her memoir Mornings Without Mii in memories of her cat. It is her life, but through the lens of a beloved pet.

The book is a quiet, meditative reflection on Inaba’s life that reads like an episodic novel. Each section is also punctuated with a poem that parallels her experiences with her cat Mii. The account of finding Mii is heartrending; she finds the cat hanging on a school fence and rescues her from her vulnerable state. She brings the cat to trust her and they have a clear special bond and they ultimately go on walks together.

There’s a sequence that I thought had a really interesting framing. Inaba talks about the dissolution of her marriage. The relationship is clearly coming to an end but it’s anchored in their relationship with the cat. Inaba is trying to find a home but the leases all have specifications against cats. In the end, she finds a place where she can move with her cat to write, but her husband cannot make the move with her. She then reflects on her choice and sees that choosing her cat was a way of making the harder choice to let her marriage end.

As the book progresses, Inaba recounts a few significant neighbours in her life around their interactions with Mii. There’s one memorable sequence in which she remembers Mii running away and the panic of trying to find her—and then finding her with a neighbour and having to reclaim the cat. There’s also a great part where she hires a cat sitter who takes a lot of effort to personalize Mii’s care.

I think that the last third of the book is probably the most powerful; we witness Mii’s declining health and eventual death. For years, Mii declines such that her digestive system no longer functions. We then see a tenderness in Inaba as she tends to Mii, making it a routine to squeeze her bladder to help her urinate and to manually push feces through her system. They have evening walk routines and Inaba it’s clear how deeply she cares for her cat. It’s tragic watching her realize that there is nothing to be done for Mii; I think most pet owners will recognize that feeling—you know it might be time, but can’t bring yourself to do it. Inaba also recollects the memories for which Mii was her ongoing companion and, despite the book being fewer than 200 pages, it feels like an earned tragic walk down memory lane.

As I mentioned, the tone of the book is a quiet, meditative one. There’s a directness and simplicity in the language that serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it gives the text an accessible quality and presents these nostalgic moments as matters-of-fact. On the other hand, the text’s elliptical quality gives it a weightiness, a mysteriousness. The poems at the end of the chapters are a nice touch; because the relationship with her cat develops alongside her writing career, the pairings have a formal purpose.

Of the poems, one about the loss of Mii and the mornings without her stands out as a highlight. The poem starts with the line “The night split split and never closed” (171). In the latter part of the poem, there’s a series of lines that I think encapsulate grief and loss beautifully:

“Your time in your body receded like the tide
leaving it empty
The dawn sunrise

A single unmoving point in a world on the move
The newspaper came   but there was nothing in it I

    wanted to read.” (171)

I think the line about there not being anything of the note in the newspaper is so true to life. Losing a pet creates a numbness where nothing else feels like it matters. And the fact that this comes at the end of a book about the loss feels like a nice parallel: words get to matter again as Inaba processes the loss of her beloved cat.

The book navigates difficult feelings: there’s a tension between the deep love you have for a pet, but the frustrations of caring for an ailing pet. There’s the grief and regret and doubt of doing what is best for your beloved animal companions. The book is pretty sweet, but at the same time offers its fair share of heartbreak.

If you’re looking for a bit of tenderness or if you’re processing your own pet grief, this book may well be for you. It seems inappropriate to end this review with my usual “happy reading” so instead, I’ll just request that you comment pictures of your little animal pals.