Abandoning a Cat

Name: Abandoning a Cat
Price: 38.00 NZD
ISBN: 9781787305724

Haruki Murakami

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A beautifully illustrated edition of international bestseller, Haruki Murakami's, meditation on memory and family.

A beautifully illustrated edition of the internationally bestselling author's meditation on memory and family.

In this meditation on memory and what makes us who we are, Haruki Murakami recalls his relationship with his father – the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him to fight in the Second World War. Murakami’s father wrote accomplished haiku and eventually became a teacher, but as Haruki grew older they found they had less and less in common. They went on to be 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 a meditation on a particular era of Japanese history, through the aftermath of the Second World War and on into the present. It is a beautiful short work of family history from one of the world’s most beloved, iconic writers.

‘The world’s most popular cult novelist’ Observer

‘A master storyteller’ Sunday Times

Published: 20 October 2026
ISBN: 9781787305724
Imprint: Harvill
Format: Hardback
Pages: 96
RRP: $38.00

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, First Person Singular and The City and Its Uncertain Walls 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.