On the island of Enoshima, the women of the Saso family have long carried a hidden duty: to be nekomorisan, keeper of the island’s cats. The novel unfolds across four generations and a hundred years—Sumie in 1912, Fude in 1967, Yoko in 1988, and seventeen-year-old Mayu in the present day, who arrives at the family inn with nowhere else to turn. Each woman’s story of love, survival, and quiet devotion weaves into the next, building a tender multigenerational saga in which cats, food, and the rhythms of island life connect the living to the long-gone.