From the critically acclaimed author of Shizuko's Daughter (a New York Times Notable Book) and Yarn, comes a fascinating new memoir about animals, loss, and finding a home in the world.

Cat and Bird, a memoir in animals, is anchored around Kyoko Mori's relationship with the six house cats who defined the major eras of her life as a writer: Dorian, Oscar, Ernest, Algernon, Miles, and Jackson. As she details the rhythms and routines of their days together, she weaves a narrative tapestry out of her past: the deep family tragedy and resilience that marked her childhood in Japan, her move to the American Midwest as a young adult, her experiences as a bird rehabilitator and cat trainer, her marriage and divorce, and the joys and profound heartbreaks that come with pet ownership. Full of razor-sharp observations and generous prose, Cat and Bird whirls into a moving meditation about grief, writing, the imagination, the solitary life, and the wonders of companionship with creatures both domestic and wild.

Kyoko Mori is one of the world's most inimitable writers.

―Howard Norman, The Bird Artist and What is Left the Daughter

A young girl leaves Tokyo with her mother in 1979, carrying her pink suitcase to a new home, a new father and sister, on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Thirty-three years later, her mother's belongings are found packed into boxes, her furniture draped in white sheets. Without so much as a note, a mother leaves these grown sisters to figure out where she has gone.

What happens when people lose their way home? Like a little barn cat, they grab onto a second family... and start again.

Lyrical...A beautifully written book about a bitterly painful coming of age.
THE KIRKUS REVIEWS
Yuki Okuda knows her mother would be proud of her grades and her achievements in sports if she were alive. But she committed suicide. And Yuki has to learn how to live with a father who doesn't seem to love her and a stepmother who treats her badly. Most important, she has to learn how to live with herself: a twelve-year-old Japanese girl growing up alone, trying to make sense of a tragedy that makes no sense at all....

A memoir of crossing cultures, losing love and finding home by a New York Times Notable author in her prime. Kyoko Mori writes about loss so quietly and wisely, and in a way no other memoirist I've read has ever managed. - Suzanne Berne, The Ghost at the Table, A Perfect Arrangement, A Crime in the Neighbourhood (Orange Prize for Fiction), and Lucile: My Grandmother in History, and Vice Versa. Sit with Kyoko Mori as she artfully takes in hand needles and fiber, and also the realities of her life story, to knit this gorgeous memoir of loss, emigration, grief, identity and the work of her hands. - Suzanne Strempek Shea, Sundays in America: A Year-Long Roadtrip in Search of Christian Faith Kyoko Mori's books are like red dragonflies at sunset. Afterwards, I'm not sure if I really experienced them or if it was a dream. - Henri Cole, Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize author of Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf As steadily and quietly as her marriage falls apart, so Kyoko Mori's understanding of knitting deepens. From the flawed school mittens made in her native Japan, where needlework is used as a way to prepare women for marriage and silence, to the beautiful unmatched patterns of cardigans, hats and shawls made in the American Midwest, Kyoko draws the connection between knitting and the new life she tried to establish in the United States. From the suicide of her mother to the last empty days of her marriage, Kyoko finds a way to begin again on her own terms. Interspersed with fact and history about knitting throughout, the narrative touchingly contemplates the nature of love, loss and what holds a marriage together. In the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me and Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, Kyoko Mori examines a particular subject to understand human nature―when to unravel, when to begin again, when to drop the stitch, and when to declare...it's finished.

POETIC . . . REMARKABLY HONEST . . . Mori describes her experiences with an admirable mixture of forthrightness and restraint.
--The Wall Street Journal
In an extraordinary memoir that is both a search for belonging and a search for understanding, Japanese-American author Kyoko Mori travels back to Kobe, Japan, the city of her birth, in an unspoken desire to come to terms with the memory of her mother's suicide and the family she left behind thirteen years before.
Throughout her seven-week trip, Kyoko struggles with her ever-present past and the lasting guilt over her mother's death. Although she meets with beloved cousins and other relatives, she agonizes over the frustrating relationship she barely maintains with her fierce father and selfish stepmother. Searching for answers, Kyoko attempts to find a new understanding of what her father is really like, and how it has affected her own place in two distinct worlds. As her time to leave draws near, Kyoko begins to understand that her family connections may be a powerful cry of the heart, but it is the new world that has given her escape from a lonely past and the power to believe in herself.
A] COMPELLING MEMOIR . . . LYRICAL.
--Seattle Times-Post Intelligencer
ASTONISHINGLY BEAUTIFUL . . . Through the clarity filters the beauty of a large heritage that Mori is by now too American to share, but still Japanese enough to appreciate its redeeming value and to be in some measure restored by it.
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
MAGICAL . . . ENLIGHTENING.
--San Francisco Chronicle