Abandoning a Cat

A beautifully illustrated edition of the internationally bestselling author's meditation on memory and family.

'Even now, I can relive the shared puzzlement of that summer day when we rode together on his bike to the beach at Koroen to abandon a striped cat, a cat that totally got the better of us...'

In this meditation on memory and what makes us who we are, Haruki Murakami recalls his relationship with his father – the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him to fight in the Second World War. Murakami’s father wrote accomplished haiku and eventually became a teacher, but as Haruki grew older they found they had less and less in common. They went on to be estranged for twenty years, only reconciling on his father’s deathbed.

This haunting personal essay is a reflection on what it means to be a father and what it means to be a son – on what it means to be loved and to be abandoned – and a meditation on a particular era of Japanese history, through the aftermath of the Second World War and on into the present. It is a beautiful short work of family history from one of the world’s most beloved, iconic writers.

Review

His imagination is one of a kind ― Washington Post

No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades ― Financial Times

The world's most popular cult novelist ― Observer

About the Author

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.