This winter, U.S. readers are meeting Japanese writer Mayumi Inaba (1950-2014) through her 1999 memoir, Mornings Without Mii, released here by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in an English translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Though Inaba was acclaimed in her home country, she has been virtually unknown in the English-speaking world until now.

Mornings Without Mii begins in the summer of 1977, when Inaba rescued a kitten stuck in a fence, the beginning of a 20-year relationship that outlasted the author’s marriage and several jobs (she worked mainly as an editor) and changes of residence. Mii became entwined with Inaba’s development as a writer and as a single woman living a solitary life in Tokyo. In a starred review, the Kirkus reviewer calls it “a striking evocation of the way we meld our lives and hearts with a beloved creature.”

Why is the book appearing in English now, 25 years after its original publication?

“This book portrays the connection cats can have with humans, but in a candid, literary manner that sets it apart as unique,” says literary agent Bruno Onuki Reynell, contrasting Mornings with the Japanese cat books that have reached bestseller status in recent years. “The fact that it is a work of nonfiction was interesting to us also. The book is a depiction of a woman’s life lived with resilience and autonomy in the face of personal and societal pressures.”

Inaba began to win awards for her writing at the age of 16 and continued to be recognized over a career that included more than two dozen novels and collections of poetry and essays. One of her award-winning short stories concerns a Tokyo librarian who mistakenly receives a call intended for a phone sex line. A popular essay collection revolves around memories of movies seen in her youth. To the Peninsula, a memoir of time she spent in a vacation home on the Japanese coast, received both the Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Prize for Literature and the Shinran Prize.

Among those who’ve been eagerly awaiting the U.S. publication of Mornings Without Mii is Miryam Sas, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Sas was friends with Inaba and remembers her with admiration and affection: “She was artful, generous, and clear-eyed about the world. I can never forget her low-pitched, raspy voice and her knowing laugh.”

Sas continues, “She balanced writing with her job as an editor, I believe about three days a week; the other four days she would write or walk along the Shinagawa Canal for inspiration. She was a talented artist in ceramics and sewed handbags out of used kimono or obi material, making collages on postcards.”

When Sas connected Inaba with aspiring fiction writer Naoko Selland in 2010, Selland was amazed that the illustrious author agreed to look at her work-in-progress; she recalls that Inaba brought Selland’s manuscript to their meeting in one of those handmade bags. “She was so kind, and urged me to keep writing,” recalls Selland, now an associate professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University.

As Reynell indicates, Mornings Without Mii reaches the U.S. on the crest of a wave of Japanese cat books that are generally lighter in tone than Inaba’s memoir: The Cat Who Saved Books, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, The Travelling Cat Chronicles, and others. These books are part of a “healing fiction” trend that’s caught on in the U.S.: cozy, lightly surreal novels that often feature cats with magical powers. In Japan, the term for this genre is iyashikei, and it can be applied to anything that is comforting and uplifting, be it a person, a meal, or a walk in the park.

Takemori, known for her translation of the Sayaka Murata’s 2018 bestseller Convenience Store Woman, thinks it likely that the success of iyashikei titles featuring cats factored into the acquisition of Inaba’s book by its U.K. publisher, Harvill Secker, who changed the title of the book to Mornings With My Cat Mii when they published it last fall.

“The original title,” says Takemori, “is a poetic reference to the loss of her cat, and how after 20 years she is now facing mornings without her. I argued against the change, but Inaba’s estate approved it, so there wasn’t much I could do. But I was thrilled when I heard the American publisher had decided to keep the original title.”

“There’s a certain poetry and ambiguity to the original title that we loved and felt befit the work,” says Lianna Culp, who edited the U.S. edition for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. As for the timing, Culp says, “it seemed to be a book of true enduring value—and has proven to be so, in Japan, after all these years—and we wanted to honor it with the modern classic treatment it merits.” Prior to the book’s publication, an excerpt appeared in the Paris Review—a stamp of approval from the literary establishment here.

As it turns out, U.S. booksellers see no need to link the book to the comforting cat novel trend because it inherently belongs to a more venerable, and beloved, category. Lindsay Lynch, the adult book buyer for Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, notes, “We do really, really well with animal memoirs, so I plan to shelve it in Memoir and Autobiography. And the cover—a line drawing of a cat—is just adorable.” She also notes that while literature in translation often takes a bit of hand-selling, there’s been a clear uptick in sales of Japanese writers.

At the Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore, Maryland, Mornings Without Mii will go right into the “Childless Cat Lady” display, where owner Emma Snyder and staff have curated a multinational feline-centric collection. “Our manager created it after JD Vance’s comment last year, and we’ve had fun with it,” she says. The Ivy is selling more literature in translation than it used to, and Snyder has been thinking about the vogue for Japanese writing in ways that seem auspicious for Mornings Without Mii. “I think people enjoy the brevity and concision of Japanese writers, and their lack of sentimentality. Often they treat topics that are unsettling or discomfiting in a direct, matter-of-fact way.”

Indeed, Mornings Without Mii’s account of feline health crises, aging, and excretions is unsqueamishly detailed, but these descriptions of the physical intimacy between human and animal make the book unique. Takemori notes that as she worked on the book, she was aware that readers in the U.K. and the U.S. would wonder why Inaba didn’t put the cat to sleep (you can find comments of this sort on Goodreads). “It probably never even occurred to Mayumi that euthanasia was a possibility,” she speculates. “Even now, many vets here will not agree to do it. In Japan, it’s not widely seen as an act of compassion, the way it is in the West.”

There’s no sugarcoating in Mornings Without Mii, of either Mii’s life or Inaba’s. “Honestly,” says Takemori, “she’s not invested in portraying herself as a particularly nice person, as she kicks her husband out, then goes off getting drunk and coming home late every night. What keeps her going is her connection with her cat, and her writing.”

Marion Winik hosts NPR’s The Weekly Reader podcast.