Every morning before breakfast, the father sits in front of a small cylindrical glass case with a carved bodhisattva inside and recites sutras with his eyes closed. Nobody speaks to him while he does it. Once, his young son asks who the prayers are for, and the answer is short: the men who died in the war, Japanese and Chinese alike. The boy does not ask a second question. Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami is, in effect, the second question, asked about sixty years too late and answered from archives, cousins and fading memory after the man who could have answered it has died.
In the physical sense Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami is slight, under a hundred pages in Philip Gabriel’s English translation, and it is the plainest prose Murakami has put his name to. There are no wells, no talking cats, no parallel worlds. There is a family, a temple in Kyoto, a war in China, and a son trying to see clearly.
Memory Keeps Getting Corrected
The quiet drama of the essay is the repeated collision between what Murakami thought he knew and what the records say. For most of his adult life he believed his father had served in the Fukuchiyama infantry regiment, a unit with a grim reputation from the fall of Nanjing, and that belief kept him from looking further. When he finally did, the paperwork placed his father in a transport regiment, and in China only after the worst of it had passed. A treasured family story about an officer who sent the young private back to his studies turns out to clash with the university’s own enrolment dates. The three years after that discharge are simply blank.
This is where Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami is most interesting as a piece of writing. A novelist famous for unreliable worlds admits, without fuss, that his own recollections are unreliable too, and that some of what he remembers may have been his mother’s version rather than his father’s. Nothing can now be checked. The book does not resolve that uncertainty; it simply declines to hide it, which is rarer in memoir than it should be.
The method has a cost. Correcting the record means laying the record out, and the middle of the essay is dense with divisions, regiments and dates of embarkation. The prose cools noticeably here. Readers will understand why it is necessary, since the whole argument depends on where one private was and when, but for several pages the father is less a person than a set of coordinates.
The Story That Was Handed Down
At the heart of the book is a single story the father told once, when Murakami was in the early years of primary school: his unit had executed a captured Chinese soldier, who sat calmly with his eyes closed and did not resist. The father spoke of the man’s composure with something like reverence. The son never learned whether his father had watched or been made to take part.
What Murakami does with this is the moral centre of Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami. He does not soften it or make excuses. He sets it in its context, the routine use of prisoners to harden new recruits in China in 1938 and 1939, and then argues that the weight of such a memory does not stay with the person who saw it. It moves into the child who hears it, as a burden that must be carried even when every instinct says to look away. The essay calls this a kind of transference, and it is persuasive precisely because it is so unadorned. The comparison he draws with François Truffaut, who spent a career making films about the childhood abandonment he could not put down, widens the point without inflating it.
Against that darkness the father’s poetry offers a counterweight. He loved haiku all his life, kept a battered leather-bound dictionary of kigo, the seasonal words every haiku needs, on his desk like scripture, and took his schoolboy son on club outings, once to a hermitage at Ishiyamadera where Bashō is said to have stayed. Murakami still remembers that afternoon entire, and cannot say why. Those passages are the warmest in the book.
Abandoning a Cat, and the Kitten in the Pine
The title points to the cat that was left at a beach and somehow got home first. But the image that lingers is a second cat. A white kitten in the Shukugawa garden races up a tall pine one evening, then cannot get down, and cries until dark. In the morning there is silence. Murakami, who once put the episode into a novel, draws a lesson from it here: climbing is easy, descending is not, and consequences can overwhelm their causes. It is a small, unbearable story, and it does more of the emotional work in Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami than the title episode does.
The other subject is the son’s own failure to please. His father, robbed of a scholar’s career by conscription, wanted him to excel at school; he did not, and he still dreams of sitting an exam he cannot answer. The two drifted apart and then stopped speaking, reconciling only in a hospital in the father’s last days. That rupture is mentioned rather than explored. Murakami says plainly that he will not go into it, and the essay is poorer for the gap, though it is hard to argue with his right to keep it. The book’s darker material, wartime atrocity, mass death in the Philippines, the death of an animal and a long final illness, is handled with restraint throughout.
Haruki Murakami Behind the Essay
Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and published his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, at thirty; this book notes, a little ruefully, that his father was delighted, though by then the two were already distant. The author of Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami has written nonfiction before, most memorably Underground, his account of the 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, and readers of The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami will recognise the same preoccupation with what lies behind a closed boundary.
The essay first ran in the magazine Bungeishunju in 2019, where it won the magazine’s readers’ prize, and appeared as a book in Japan in April 2020 with drawings by the young Taiwanese illustrator Gao Yan. Knopf brought the English text out on 20 October 2026, so it is available now, in a version by Gabriel, whose long partnership with the author includes Kafka on the Shore.
What It Leaves Behind
Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami is too brief and too guarded to be a major work, and the archival middle will test readers who came for the voice. But its honesty about memory, and its refusal to let an inherited cruelty stay buried, give it a weight its page count does not suggest.
Readers who want more on a child piecing together a parent after death should turn to Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, which is louder and more openly grieving. Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World covers similar ground in fiction, a Japanese father unwilling to look straight at his war, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima is the classic companion for the war’s cost to ordinary lives.
The essay ends where it began, with a cat and a question nobody could answer. Murakami no longer seems to expect an answer. He has settled for asking properly.