Haruki Murakami will explore his relationship with his father in a memoir coming later this year.
Knopf announced that it will publish the Japanese novelist’s Abandoning a Cat: A Personal Story, translated by Philip Gabriel, in the fall. It calls the book “a moving reflection on the author’s father—plus a cat!” and “a beautiful short work of family history from one of our most beloved, iconic writers.”
Murakami, among Japan’s best known authors, made his literary debut in 1979 with the novel Hear the Wind Sing. More than a dozen novels followed, including Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, and The City and Its Uncertain Walls. His latest novel, The Tale of KAHO, was published in Japan earlier this month; an English-language translation has not been announced.
Abandoning a Cat is the unabridged version of an essay that Murakami published in The New Yorker in 2019. The book, Knopf says, “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 second world war on into the present.”
Abandoning a Cat is slated for publication on Oct. 20.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
