A moving reflection on the author's father--plus a cat!--this is a beautiful short work of family history from one of our most beloved, iconic writers. Originally published in the New Yorker in 2019, and now presented in a full, unabridged form, Abandoning a Cat is a poignant, self-reflective work by Haruki Murakami. Here he writes about his father, the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him into the second world war. Murakami's father wrote accomplished haiku and eventually became a teacher. As Haruki grew older -- as he became an adult and then a writer, he and his father found they had little in common. They were later 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 also on a particular moment of Japanese history, through the aftermath of the secon
