‘Mornings With My Cat Mii’ joins other Japanese novels that confront the absurdities of modern life

I think back to when I was calling for a dead dog. It had only been four months since a close friend’s dog had passed away, and I winced right after I realised my mistake, spilling out a flurry of apologies. My friend was okay about it, flashing a knowing smile and thinking about P, his dog, I thought, for the sake of the narrativisation. P never liked me. Not that I ever gave him a reason to. He bared his teeth, and so did I. Another friend told me about a woman he used to date, who used to force him to tag along for dog rescue missions, feed every stray she encountered, and often lambast humans who didn’t show the same dedication. (He, like me, is apathetic to animals.) “She was obsessive,” he tells me. “Cats are better. You can’t bribe your way into their love.”

The other way

I know nothing about what it means to be a pet parent, so when I read Mayumi Inaba’s Mornings With My Cat Mii, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, I was surprised that I was engrossed in the novel. More surprising is how its gentle, contemplative style evokes this feeling, even as it abandons dramatic plot twists. Though they centre on the banality of life through acute character interiority, contemporary Japanese novels are far from being plotless. In Mornings With My Cat Mii, a woman navigating life’s complexities finds solace in her enduring bond with her beloved cat. There’s another, and not the only, Japanese novel you can summarily chart: Sweet Bean Paste, in which an ex-convict-turned-street-vendor finds unexpected friendship while learning the art of making traditional Japanese sweets. Not to mention Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, a novel about a lonely young woman grieving a relationship, who finds comfort – and, I would argue, purpose – in the world of secondhand bookshops.

All these novels are set in the modern world, where even the physical spaces the characters find themselves are alienating. They constantly negotiate between success, which necessitates embracing the modern and contemporary, and community, often juxtaposed against this success. For them, these options are two ends of a spectrum, not a life they can eventually transition to, like New York investment bankers who choose to move to the countryside when they’re tired of the city.

“Form follows function” is the guiding principle of architecture in this modern world; the design of a building or object should primarily reflect its intended purpose, emphasise simplicity, functionality, and reject anything that’s “unnecessary.” What is the point of a house in the modern world? It is a luxury if your rented apartment offers security, comfort, and a sense of identity instead of a dreaded landlord, leaky taps, and rent that seems to eat up your salary before you’ve even received it. Function, in a rented house, is avoiding homelessness. These three translations seem to suggest that another life is possible in Japan, where you can retreat into the old, without the anachronism you’d expect to chaperone such a decision.

Missing ‘real life’

In Mornings With My Cat Mii, the narrator works for a small design firm in Shinjuku and has a normal husband, ordinary in that he doesn’t get in her way like other typical husbands. Eventually, a nondescript career and a strained marriage orchestrate a staccato life that becomes cacophonic. Our characters are divorced before we even know them as a couple, predictably, just as we think of parting in this new old world (“[Mii’s] development as the seasons passed became the main topic of conversation between me and my husband.”)

The narrator and her husband used to live in a house in Kokubunji, a suburb of Tokyo. A traditional Japanese house with a south-facing veranda and a garden, the house was a bubble against the backdrop of the city, eventually bursting when the owner transferred back with his family, forcing the narrator to move. Her new flat, which she found after a tiresome search, is a small, modern, fifth-floor apartment. It is isolated, somewhat sterile, and, to Mii’s horror, doesn’t let her run free. Ironically, it is the only place that would let the narrator keep her.

In this apartment, Mii’s body disintegrates absolutely, standing as a metaphor for what unchecked modernity can do. Without the shackles of propriety that govern the human body, this animal body surrenders. It is unassisted by the affectation that accompanies the narrator’s every day, which has to be constantly mediated. (“Living in an apartment, her nose and legs were degenerating, and she had finally lost touch with the wild. Mii was stricken with that reality, and I was stricken by my own laziness at not having gone out for a walk with her that night.”) Mii begins experiencing incontinence, loses strength in her hind legs, and has trouble eliminating waste, making the narrator her primary caretaker. Towards the end of the novel, faced with Mii’s declining health and the upcoming New Year holiday, the narrator decides to take Mii to a cottage owned by her family, where she can finally touch grass after years of living in an unyielding apartment.

Often used as a quip to tell someone to go outside or enjoy nature, “touch grass” is a cri de cœur to spend less time on electronic devices, or an appeal to retain your grip on reality, which is exactly what Mii was deprived of – the real-life she lived in Kokubunji, not the modern life, which to her, was momentary.

Fitting into modernity

In Sweet Bean Paste, Sentaro, the protagonist, doesn’t have a life he can return to, nor one he can talk towards. He works at the Doraharu sweet bean shop to repay a debt to his late boss’s wife, who financially supported him and offered him employment after his release from prison. In the novel, the space of the prison isn’t described; in fact, it exists in obscurity, as a reference that's plopped on in the course of the story. The writer, Tetsuya Akikawa, isn’t tight-fisted about the Doraharu Shop, which he paints as a small and traditional shop with a ragged aesthetic. It’s not fancy or trendy, and the counter takes up a significant portion of the room. Within these cramped quarters, Sentaro and Tokue, the 76-year-old woman with “bent like hooks” fingers, worked together. Hesitant to hire her at first due to her age and mangled fingers, despite her offer to work for less pay than he had advertised, Sentaro eventually relents to her persistence.

Tokue’s slightly off appearance was a result of Hansen’s disease, which forced her to be sequestered in an isolated sanatorium when she was fourteen. Upon arriving at the sanatorium, Tokue was immediately separated from her family, stripped of all her belongings, including a cherished blouse her mother had made for her, and perhaps most cardinal of them all – her name. She could leave the premises only after the repeal of the law that had mandated the isolation of people with Hansen’s disease, even after they were cured. But public opinion rarely catches up with the law, and Sentaro was forced to let Tokue go.

There’s an animal in Sweet Bean Paste as well, a canary that was attacked by a cat and rescued by a frigid schoolgirl, Wakana, who frequented Doraharu. Wakana, who had become close to Tokue, arrives at the shop with Marvy the canary, asking Sentaro if he can take care of it after Tokue had left (“This baby has nowhere to go.”) Marvy, like Tokue, couldn’t fit into modernity in Japan, and owners of most houses, like in Mornings With My Cat Mii, didn’t allow pets, regardless of how unintrusive they might be.

Although there’s no animal in Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, characters get kicked out of relationships just as casually, without any explanation. Takato, the protagonist, is met with a boyfriend who tells her “I’m going to get married.” As she settles into the absurdity of the statement, she and the reader are met with more punches: He is marrying another woman. He had been seeing her for longer than her. And yes, his fiancée was prettier than her. Most cruel, perhaps, is the way that he tells her all of this, in a matter-of-fact manner, as if it were the norm in a deeply misogynistic Japan. Takato leaves her single-person apartment in the city to live with her idiosyncratic uncle in the more homely nooks of Jimbocho, a neighbourhood filled with a variety of secondhand bookshops, each with its unique character and specialisation. Her uncle’s bookshop is a two-storey wooden building, about 30 years old, crammed with books, overflowing shelves, and stacks, enveloped with a musty, old-book smell, and suddenly she’s no longer lonely. (“And I know, without a doubt, that if not for those days [at the bookshop], the rest of my life would have been bland, monotonous, and lonely.”)

Present tense

These Japanese novels have seemed to move ahead. What can we do about the now, they ask, without coming too close to the present? That requires a kind of retrospection that’s impossible now. In these novels, the past exists in remnants, not in its entirety the way it seems to in other literatures, especially American. In contemporary American fiction, almost every novel that wins an award supplicates to what Toni Morrison calls “rememory,” the way memories, especially traumatic ones, can persist and resurface in the present, almost as if they have a life that precedes the characters.

This isn’t the only question these Japanese novels are interested in. Nor are they “historical” in a singular way. The effect of modernity isn’t discussed as much as it’s splayed out in the character arcs and the physical, tangible situations they find themselves in. Stigma isn’t discussed as a concept, nor are -isms as abstractions you can break down, and you won’t find a character explicitly acknowledging why what’s happening happened in their lives – mostly because they can’t explain it themselves. And even if they do, it’s with quiet resignation.

When I think back to the moment when I called out for P, I see now it wasn’t just about him, but also his presence that I’d gotten used to. Like Mii, who becomes a companion to the narrator in the shifting landscape of modern life, P’s death calls attention to my resignation to how the modern world is full of relationships that form, dissolve, and reform, leaving us wondering if we can find solace in anything at all. Is another life possible? That’s the question these Japanese novels wanted to answer. (Perhaps, but only in Japan. And if you’re really lucky.)

Mornings With My Cat Mii, Mayumi Inaba, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, Harville Secker.