Excerpt from Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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Our First Place

It was the end of summer, 1977. At least I think it was late summer. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny tiny baby kitten.

Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck in the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y neighborhood of Fuchu City in western Tokyo.

What direction was the wind blowing that night? It was most likely a gentle breeze blowing up to my house from the river. I followed her cries as they carried on this breeze. At first I searched the gaps in the hedge around my house and in among the weeds of the empty plots on my street. But her cries were coming from high up, not low down. I looked up and suddenly saw a little white dot.

The large expanse of the school grounds was shrouded in the dim light. Before me was a high fence separating the road and the school. Somebody must have shoved the kitten into the fence. She was hanging so high up that even on tiptoe, I could barely reach her as she clung on for dear life.

With sharp pointy ears, innocent glistening eyes and a pink slit of a mouth, she was puffing her body up as much as she could to stop herself from falling, looking down at me fearfully. It was obvious that she hadn't dropped there out of nowhere or climbed up by herself, but had been put there deliberately out of malice or mischief.

"Come with me…"

I reached out my arms and the tiny kitten clung to me with surprising strength. She was freezing cold, a helpless little thing. I hugged her to my chest and a sweet animal scent filled my nostrils. Her body was infused with the smell of milk and summer. The smooth feel of soft baby fur filled the palm of my hand.

She couldn't have been long born, yet she already had perfectly formed needle-sharp claws, and her nose and mouth and everything about her was tiny and adorable. As I stroked her, she leaned her entire body weight into me, helplessly light, and bumped her head against me a few times.

I didn't know where her mother was, or whether she had been dumped or had strayed from her mother and gotten lost before someone put her into the fence. All I knew was that she must have felt utterly desperate hanging up there, and I just wanted to give her somewhere cozy to rest at least for the night. Did I have any milk at home? I'd have to find a box where she could feel safe … My mind full of such thoughts, I hugged her to my chest and rushed back home.

"A kitten," I told my husband as I ran into the kitchen. "She was crying outside." I held her up by the scruff of her neck for him to see. "Look how little she is!" My cotton shirt made a ripping sound as I peeled her away from my chest. In the light I could see she had a pretty face. She was a calico, with white, black and tan stripes on her head and patches on her back, and a belly that was pure white.

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It was over twenty years ago now, but I can still clearly remember that tiny kitten's sharp claws. I'll never forget how she innocently butted her little head against my chest, either. Or the breeze that night. Those cries from the school fence would never have reached me without it. Maybe it delivered her cries to my window. Perhaps by some ghostly chance the breeze from the river had a magical power that night.

The breeze came in waves from the river up to the houses in my neighborhood. Maybe it was the quality of the water, but to me it always seemed to have a refreshing smell of liquor, and it was so pleasant, neither too strong nor too cold, that in summer and autumn I wanted to keep my windows open all the time. Or maybe it was thanks to the power of my windows that I found my cat.

Three years or so after we moved to Tokyo, I abruptly stopped making yellow curtains. In the little house we'd lived in before this one, I'd been obsessed with making yellow curtains and yellow cushions.

Excerpted from Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba. Copyright © 2025 by Mayumi Inaba. Excerpted by permission of FSG Originals. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.