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Abandoning a Cat
  • Published: 20 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781787305724
  • Imprint: Harvill
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $34.99

Abandoning a Cat

Formats & editions
Hardback
20 Oct 2026
EBook
20 Oct 2026
Audiobook
20 Oct 2026
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A beautifully illustrated edition of international bestseller, Haruki Murakami's, meditation on memory and family.

‘It’s the accumulation of insignificant things that has made me the person I am.’

In this meditation on memory and what makes us who we are Haruki recalls his relationship with his father. When Haruki was six his father took him on a bike ride to a nearby beach to abandon their cat. Haruki can no longer remember why his father wanted to do this but when they arrived home to find the cat back before them he recalls how his father respected this and let the cat stay. He goes on to consider how his father’s upbringing and experience as a soldier may have caused the distance that grew between them for twenty years, and only ended with Haruki’s visit to his father’s deathbed.

‘All we can do is breathe the air of the period we live in, carry with us the special burdens of the time, and grow up within those confines.’
  • Published: 20 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781787305724
  • Imprint: Harvill
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $34.99

About the author

Haruki Murakami

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.
portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Kafka on the Shore
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Super-Frog Saves Tokyo
See all

Praise for Abandoning a Cat

The world's most popular cult novelist

Observer

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

Financial Times

His imagination is one of a kind

Washington Post