Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. Knopf. 2026.
Reviewed by David Heck
Cats are quintessentially Murakami-esque.
Like the more familiar term “Kafka-esque” – the surreal feeling of being trapped in a world whose rules no longer make sense, such as Gregor Samsa waking to discover he has transformed into a giant insect – Murakami has earned his own adjective that describes an atmosphere that fluctuates between a dream world and mundane reality. In his novels, fish rain from the sky, wells become portals, mysterious women appear without explanation, and cats waft in and out of pages like symbolic messengers from another realm. They’re a familiar trope in his novels: In Kafka on the Shore, for example, a cat holds a deep philosophical conversation. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the plot is propelled by the search for a missing cat. In 1Q84, a man becomes lost in a town of cats. But what is it about cats that makes them Murakami-esque? On the one hand, these household companions are utterly ordinary; on the other hand, these silent, mysterious creatures have almost supernatural abilities, seeming to exist somewhere on the border of our world and another, just like his novels.
This is why Murakami’s latest book, Abandoning a Cat, is an unexpected work of non-fiction. The title refers to a childhood memory in which Murakami and his father set off on a bike to the beach with the family cat, left it there, and returned home, only to discover that the cat had astonishingly beaten them back. It’s a Murakami-esque moment, despite the fact that this isn’t a fictional work at all. Nor is it actually about the cat, as the title would suggest. It’s really about fathers and sons.
Murakami has rarely written directly about his father, making this memoir feel surprisingly intimate. Before becoming one of the world’s most renowned novelists – a career he famously didn’t start until he was thirty after running a Tokyo jazz club called, fittingly enough, Peter Cat – Murakami largely kept his family history behind closed doors; here, he finally lets us in.
His father emerges as a complicated figure, a lover of literature who penned haiku in his twenties, a drafted soldier who narrowly missed participating in the rapacious march into Nanjing in 1937, and a man who carried the psychological weight of war for the rest of his life. In one particularly striking passage, Murakami recounts how his father had witnessed the execution of a Chinese soldier and was struck by the soldier’s remarkable composure in the face of death:
He related matter-of-factly how the execution had taken place. Though the Chinese soldier knew that he was going to be killed, he didn’t struggle, didn’t show any fear, but just sat there quietly with his eyes closed. And he was decapitated. The man’s attitude was exemplary, my father told me. He seemed to have deep feelings of respect for the Chinese soldier and probably felt that way until the end of his life.
This rawness is somewhat uncharacteristic of Murakami’s usual style, though he openly admits that some memories of his father, who died in 2008 at the age of 90, have faded like old photographs. A current of wistful, reverent mourning runs underneath it all. Murakami noticeably fast forwards the unpleasant parts of their relationship, out of respect for his memory. What’s left is something gentle, an attempt to have us understand that he is simply “the ordinary son of an ordinary man.”
Reading the book often made me wonder how much any of us really know our fathers. Mine is very much the “Here’s your mother” type on the phone. I know he was neglected by his own mother and that he served in Vietnam, but beyond that, he remains something of a sealed vault. Whether because of habit, personality, or perhaps a lingering instinct of his Top Secret Clearance, stories about childhood, regrets, hopes, loves, or fears rarely emerge. There seems to be so much information lying dormant beneath the surface. I suspect many readers will recognize that feeling. Murakami certainly does.
Later in the memoir, he reflects:
My father and I were born into different ages and environments, and our way of thinking and viewing the world were miles apart. If at a certain point, I’d attempted to rebuild our relationship, things might have gone in a different direction, but I was too involved and focused on what I wanted to make the effort.
It’s the kind of realization that applies universally. Some of us spend so much of our lives trying to find out who we are as individuals and distance ourselves from family only to discover how much of us is inherited through biology or family history. The unfortunate part is that Murakami didn’t speak to his father for nearly twenty years, except when necessary, only to finally reconcile in some small way when looking down at his sickly, emaciated father in his final days. Murakami insists in the afterword that he “didn’t intend, though, to write this as some kind of message,” only to preserve “this unknown story that took place in an out-of-the-way corner of history,” but it is difficult not to come away with one: Don’t wait until you are standing beside an aging parent, looking down at someone you used to look up to, to ask the questions you’ve always wanted to ask.
At the same time, my mind kept returning to Murakami’s cat. Why was that the necessary entry point to this memoir? After all, he could have titled this reflection on his father anything. Perhaps Murakami just really likes cats, or perhaps, in that Murakami-esque way, they really can act as symbolic messengers. Like the cat that refused to be abandoned on the beach that day, Murakami’s relationship with his father lay neglected for many years before eventually finding its way back. Some relationships are not meant to be abandoned. They will patiently wait for you to return home.
David Heck is a public high school English teacher in Anaheim, California.