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Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

Marie Mutsuki Mockett (Goodreads Author)

3.96 · Rating details · 665 ratings · 125 reviews

Marie Mutsuki Mockett's family owns a Buddhist temple 25 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In March 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami, radiation levels prohibited the burial of her Japanese grandfather's bones. As Japan mourned thousands of people lost in the disaster, Mockett also grieved for her American father, who had died unexpectedly.

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Hardcover, First Edition, 330 pages

Published January 19th 2015 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Start your review of Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

Oct 29, 2014 Kris rated it really liked it

Shelves: japan, nonfiction, travel

What an incredibly lovely but solemn book. The reader journeys across Japan with Mrs. Mockett, a Japanese-American woman, who recently lost her father as she grapples with both the grief of his death and that of the devastating aftereffects of the March 2011 tsunami. We visit the family-run temple residing in the long shadow of Fukushima nuclear power plant that she knows well from her youth. Pilgrimages are made to other temples and shrines from zen to Pure Land to Shingon to the delicate weavi ...more

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Oct 29, 2014 Anne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, first-read, memoir, travel

I received an ARC of this book from W.W. Norton through the Goodreads Giveaway program.

It took me a long time to read this book as I was literally savoring every word. The author takes a spiritual journey through Japan, her mother's homeland, where the author spent much of her own childhood. She has been unable to recover from the sadness she feels at the deaths of her father and of her maternal grandparents, and seeks solace through the Buddhist faith of her family. It is an absolutely fascinat ...more

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Dec 04, 2016 Margaret rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: asian-experience, sociology, spirituality, non-fiction, memoir

A solid three star book though sometimes it inched up in the rating when the author wrote more about the Japanese character. Her discussion of the Japanese aesthetic view of wabi sabi, interested me greatly. At some point the subject of ghosts and the spirit world lost my attention, though I was very much interested in the various Buddhist sects. The writing at times was disjointed but not so much that it lost my interest or focus.

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Feb 08, 2015 Alexis rated it it was amazing

Not knowing much about the book other than it was about grief and Zen Buddhism, and nothing at all about the author, I went to a reading of it. Mockett read an excerpt, and I found that my fears of New Age-ism and "Eat, Pray, Love" fetishization and egotism were totally unfounded. This is much more than just a memoir; it's a history book, a book on Japanese culture, and on religion as well. Mockett does an incredible job of providing the necessary context for her experiences, (historical, cultur Not knowing much about the book other than it was about grief and Zen Buddhism, and nothing at all about the author, I went to a reading of it. Mockett read an excerpt, and I found that my fears of New Age-ism and "Eat, Pray, Love" fetishization and egotism were totally unfounded. This is much more than just a memoir; it's a history book, a book on Japanese culture, and on religion as well. Mockett does an incredible job of providing the necessary context for her experiences, (historical, cultural, and personal), seamlessly weaving in her own valuable insights that never judge or recoil from her encounters; it's a work that humanizes rather than objectifies Japanese culture, which I found refreshing. You could say she has no other choice; many of the people she writes about aren't strangers, they're her relatives, family friends, and co-workers.

Surprisingly (to me), a great deal of the book focuses on Buddhism in all its variations in Japan. I was struck by the many perceptive thoughts the author had on meditation and specifically, Zen, (not least of which because I, too, have had eerily similar thoughts and experiences, both in personal practice and academic study of Buddhism, and had thought I was completely alone in them). These were deep insights, worded concisely, simply, on the transformative effects of practicing meditation and ritual that serious practitioners will recognize as a product of great sincerity and thoughtfulness. There's also a total absence of the trendiness of injecting "mindful" rhetoric into her writing, for which I was very grateful. There's far too much writing on Buddhist meditation in the West that loves to abstract to the extreme the usefulness of such a practice. Mockett in her simple, direct way provides many examples of the quotidian, unpretentious benefits of Buddhism for people, even those in great personal distress, to illuminating effect.

After finishing the book, I did look at some of the reviews. The NY Times review was puzzling to me, mostly because of the value judgments of Japanese cultural practices, the criticism about Mockett's insights and the structure of the narrative and ending, (I might be doing a "Brian Williams" and be misremembering, but I recall her speaking about how time and stories are not necessarily linear in Japanese storytelling, and that endings don't have be neatly packaged, happy affairs, which directly influenced how she conceived of this memoir and was a very deliberate choice.). Lastly, I think the reviewer was wrong--those who have passed on aren't "invisibly present," they can be very visibly still with us. ...more

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Dec 02, 2017 GoldGato rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: catastrophe, library-checkout, non-fiction, asia, memoir, winter

After the Tohoku quake and tsunami caused the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, there was a widespread effort to plant sunflowers as a way to remove radiation from the soil. It was a gentle Buddhist way to try to make life bearable again in a land where the dead are never far away from the living. This kind of insight into a major catastrophe is what made reading this book such a delight.

It was once believed that if a chair or table or any object had been around for one hundred ye After the Tohoku quake and tsunami caused the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, there was a widespread effort to plant sunflowers as a way to remove radiation from the soil. It was a gentle Buddhist way to try to make life bearable again in a land where the dead are never far away from the living. This kind of insight into a major catastrophe is what made reading this book such a delight.

It was once believed that if a chair or table or any object had been around for one hundred years, it had the right to get a soul. As a result, people in Japan sometimes destroyed things that turned ninety-nine, in order to avoid having to put up with them being alive. Very often, the destroyed ninety-nine-year-old things were resentful to be relegated to the trash heap. Their chance at mortality thwarted, the indignant parasols and notebooks turned into mischievous spirits hell bent on revenge.

Combining a journey undertaken to correctly bury a grandparent's bones (not body, but bones) with a look at the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami plus a travelogue on the temples and towns along the northeast coast make this a beguiling read. Throw in some history on the Shinto and Buddhist religions, and the end result is so much more than I ever expected. The author is honest in her descriptions of Japan and the people (she is stunned to discover there were looters after the disaster), as she describes her own awareness of being Japanese American.

"Do you know what you hear when a tsunami comes? You hear car horns. That is the last sound you hear when a car is flooded with water. The pressure of the water hits the horn, and it honks and honks until finally the car is so damaged it cannot make a sound."

The description of the tsunami is hedoro, which is the black underbelly of the sea. This is what the survivors saw of the Black Wave that destroyed their communities and family members. What lies beneath is brought to the top of the wave in all its smelly triumph. There are real-life searches for fairies, the zashiki warashi of Japanese lore. By the time I finished this book, I felt a greater appreciation for life as well as death.

Book Season = Winter (radiated snow) ...more

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Mar 08, 2016 Liralen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, reviewed, asia, z-2016, travel, z-mfa

The subtitle of the book is A Journey, and Mockett's journey is a complicated one. Half Japanese by birth, she never forgets—or lets the reader forget—that she was also born and raised American. With family in Japan, though, and her grandfather's bones to bury, she sets out in the wake of the 2011 earthquake to better understand Buddhism and grief and Japan's peacefully co-existing contradictions.

I read this for class, and it's easily my favourite book of the semester. There aren't easy answers, ...more

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Sep 20, 2018 Ian Josh rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Really Enjoyable Read

Full Review on Blog:

https://ianjoshyateswriting.blogspot.com ...more

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Mar 12, 2017 Tara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

As someone living in Japan for almost four years, I loved this book. I found myself thinking, "Yes, exactly. That's exactly how Japan feels" over and over while I read. The author opened up a piece of Japan to me that I do not have access to because of the language barrier.

There are no wasted words or pages in this book. It is filled with history, culture, religion and personal stories. Some reviewers thought she jumped around too much. Because this is a cultural exploration of grief, the shift ...more

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Jul 04, 2016 Kkraemer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The first Noble Truth is that we all suffer, and one of those sufferings, for all of us, is the loss of the people we love. Death is inevitable, as are the wounds caused by the loss of those around us.

The writer has lost her father, her grandparents, and her sense of joy. She returns to the land of her mother's birth to try to make sense of her pain. Her mother's family has long owned a temple. Her ancestors helped people, and, when there seemed to be no one to inherit the temple and its respons The first Noble Truth is that we all suffer, and one of those sufferings, for all of us, is the loss of the people we love. Death is inevitable, as are the wounds caused by the loss of those around us.

The writer has lost her father, her grandparents, and her sense of joy. She returns to the land of her mother's birth to try to make sense of her pain. Her mother's family has long owned a temple. Her ancestors helped people, and, when there seemed to be no one to inherit the temple and its responsibilities, her family had adopted a priest to continue the work. Naturally, her journey begins at this temple, but she quickly notes that this journey is a single and personal one that simply is a part of a huge movement of people and spirits in the wake of the Fukushima tsunami.

Families grieve. The towns and land are stricken. Ruins have replaced communities, and everywhere, people struggle to overcome unbearable sadness. They seek ways to let go.

That's the term: let go. In this part of Japan, the dead are everywhere, and the living must encourage them to move on to the next existence while they, themselves, must move on in their own lives. Everyone is struggling to find a way to let this happen.

The writer spends time with the priest at her family's temple, and then listens to priests who come to the community to listen to those who have been left behind. The priests know that they must listen, that listening is the only thing that will allow this letting go to occur.

She also goes to other temples to learn about this process of letting go, to see the space between the living and the dead, to understand how to grapple with the ghosts and the dead and those who need her in full life right now.

The book is a memoir, and it explains a world -- and a world view -- at great variance from what Americans know, believe, and do. Because she is both American and Japanese, and because she can not only speak Japanese but can "read" the culture, she guides the reader through a world both unfamiliar and fundamentally calming, a center from which to approach this first Noble Truth of human existence.

Utterly fascinating. ...more

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Feb 26, 2015 Becky rated it liked it

Shelves: adult, nonfiction, memoir, grief, 2015, japan

Mockett’s memoir explores her experiences with Japanese traditions surrounding grief. She personally grieves her American father who died recently and unexpectedly, an event that is probably partially the impetus for her memoir. Yet she is also deeply affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami where so many thousands died. She travels to her extended family’s Buddhist temple in 2011, not far from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and finds herself in a country where almost everyone is grieving ...more

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Sep 09, 2018 V rated it liked it · review of another edition

2.5, leaning toward 3. Issues first. The book is not at its best when it compares "Japanese" to "Westerners". I put them in quotes because these categories seem quite solid to the author, but they don't to me, and I find prejudice in the comparison to both sides. Repeated comparisons come to my eye as essentialist at best and Orientalist at worst. There is some attention to how the older and younger generations behave, and there is interest in that, but again the broad strokes are troubling. The ...more

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Jun 10, 2017 Glen U rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book is an amazing look into the cultural mores of Japan especially concerning grief and death. It is a clear and concise treatise on the different forms of Buddhism and how the Japanese people believe in both animism and a supreme being. It incorporates the journey of a Japanese-American woman to Japan, soon after the devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Northern Japan. It also captures the clear differences in thinking, in acting, in living between those of the Japanese people ...more

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Mar 21, 2018 Chris Beal rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: gaijin-in-japan, self-discovery-abroad, spiritual-memoir

Please see my review here:
http://journeystotruth.blogspot.com/ ...more

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May 05, 2019 Mrs. Danvers rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, woman-writer, end-of-life-issues

A gently beautiful consideration of loss.

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Jan 10, 2017 Moira Clunie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: spirituality, autobiography, race, travel, japan, mental-health, grief

a rich, generous and deeply personal exploration of japanese spirituality and religion, approaches to death, grief & ancestors, and the collective trauma of the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster. careful and nuanced telling of the process of learning about and making sense of these things as a relative outsider. evocative descriptions of sights, tastes, smells and the feelings of places.

i read this hungrily in a single day (just after returning from a visit to Tokyo), and am looking forward t ...more

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Oct 09, 2014 Alison rated it it was amazing

Shelves: first-reads, non-fiction, metaphysical, japan, religion, grief

I received this book for free through Goodreads Fist Reads

After her Grandfathers death, the author who is _ Japanese and whose family owns a Buddhist Temple just 25 miles from the Fukushima Daiich nuclear plant, decides to go back to visit after the earthquake and tsunami that took many lives on March 11, 2011. The plant which was damaged in the tsunami as well, started to leaked radiation causing the area to become an unsafe place for people to return. Not having been able to bury her Grandfath I received this book for free through Goodreads Fist Reads

After her Grandfathers death, the author who is _ Japanese and whose family owns a Buddhist Temple just 25 miles from the Fukushima Daiich nuclear plant, decides to go back to visit after the earthquake and tsunami that took many lives on March 11, 2011. The plant which was damaged in the tsunami as well, started to leaked radiation causing the area to become an unsafe place for people to return. Not having been able to bury her Grandfathers bones at the time of his death, she had to wait for a time where they could once again dig in the soil. The author was also still mourning the death of her father who had died three years earlier, so she decides to study how the Japanese deal with grief , which she hopes will help her with hers as well. From visiting different Obon Ceremonies (The Festival of Souls is a Buddhist celebration. The Japanese believe that during this period the souls of their ancestors return to their homes on earth. This is the time when people can guide and help their ancestors' spirits to find peace.) to experiencing many different Buddhist ceremonies, and rituals. From the many Temples and their priest that she talks to, and how each of them is helping their community deal with their grief. This book delves into the history of japan and Buddhism, its traditions,religion, folklore and the respect the people have for these traditions.
I love Buddhas and have them all through my house, but I now see that I do not really know that much about Buddhism, from Zen, Pure Land to Shingon, it was a fascinating look into its history and what it stands for.
While there, the author was quite often told that since she was only _ Japanese, and even though she knows the language, that she would not be able to completely understand the culture, people, food etc. as she was considered a foreigner.
Very complex and full of great knowledge, this book was a very exciting read. If you are interested in Buddhism or the Japanese culture, or just want to learn about other cultures, this book is for you. ...more

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Mar 12, 2015 Linda Lombardi rated it it was amazing

I read an interview with the author that was so compelling to me that I put aside everything that turned me off about the descriptions of this book. I don't normally read memoirs and have no interest in reading a memoir about grieving a dead father. But that's not what it is. We hardly learn anything about the author's father other than that she's sad he's dead. It's less about the aftermath of 3/11 than I expected (although that's definitely a central component.) And if I'd known this was mostl ...more

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Feb 20, 2015 Tina rated it liked it

The theme of this book - learning to deal with grief - is wonderful. The author shares the beliefs of Buddhism about the connection between the living and the dead, and they are beautiful. She shares her insights into the Japanese people, their beliefs, and their struggles since the 2011 tsunami, and it made me desire more information. Japan, and the temples named in this story, are now on my bucket list. I'd love to learn to turn my thoughts into myself, to meditate like she did.

The descriptio ...more

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Oct 25, 2014 Samantha rated it really liked it

I won an advance copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway, and I'm very glad that I did!

While at times meandering and repetitive, this is a well written book. Miss Mockett's journey across Japan visiting many different temples and shrines to process her personal grief, while at the same time experiencing the aftermath of the March 2011 disaster, was compelling and also easy to follow. I am quite fond of Japanese spirituality, from ceremonies to ghost stories, so there was a lot to enjoy he ...more

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Jan 27, 2015 Fiona rated it liked it

Shelves: religion, non-fiction, atw-frequent-flyer-2015

Interesting exploration about how the Japanese grieve.

The author loses her father and grandparents. She's learning to deal with her grief or as she describes it she want to be "more happy than sad". She travels to Japan which is her mother's homeland during the aftermath of the March 11, 2011 tsunami. This is the perfect time and place for her to learn how the Japanese grieve.

She visits several temples and Buddhist training schools. In fact, her family are guardians of a small temple. I learned ...more

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Jan 20, 2015 Lud rated it really liked it

I read this book primarily because of how moved I was by the film "Departures" (2010), a Japanese film that was a fascinating exploration of grief and death. The film was fiction - this book is nonfiction, and revolves around the survivors of the devastating tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. The author and her mother visit Japan several weeks after the disaster, as family members live near the nuclear facility. The author continues with a personal journey into Buddhism, and examines a country shoc ...more

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Sep 02, 2020 Kim rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Passages that struck me:
"As a priest, Maruko had seen many people die, and he had seen many families just after a loved one had passed away. The very worst thing was when someone forgot to say "thank you" before dying. If only the dead could see the pain they left behind when they died selfishly. He often counseled the living on this inherited pain and tried to get them to put it into context.
"In order to become myself, my mistakes and hardships were also necessary." This was an essential way to Passages that struck me:
"As a priest, Maruko had seen many people die, and he had seen many families just after a loved one had passed away. The very worst thing was when someone forgot to say "thank you" before dying. If only the dead could see the pain they left behind when they died selfishly. He often counseled the living on this inherited pain and tried to get them to put it into context.
"In order to become myself, my mistakes and hardships were also necessary." This was an essential way to view life. It was only by keeping this in mind at all times that one could live in the present. The practice of Zen, he said, was about looking forward and living in this way." (109)

"Look at this dish right here, he said. Will this be here in a million years? No. So it is here. But it is not here. You know about atoms? Kukai thought about atoms long before we were able to see them. If we had a thread that was thin enough, we could thread it though the cup and it would go out the other side. And so the cup is here, but it is not here. If enough time were to go by, the cup would not be here, but if we were to look for its atoms, we would find them scattered around the universe, which means the cup would be everywhere. And in the same way, the Buddha is everywhere. The point of Shingon is not to be nothing, but to understand that everything is and is not actually concrete. That's it.
Twelve hundred years of history, thousands of pages of ink spilled on the subject of what the Buddha meant by entering the "void" and "nothingness." For me, this was the simplest, clearest explanation I had ever heard...
"Matter is in your heart. Your heart is in matter. Everything is the same thing. The point of meditation is to feel this deeply. Within your heart." (151)

"Ryushin told me that it was okay for my mind to be skeptical, even clouded. Meditation was supposed to be like looking at the moon. Occasionally, a cloud would come in front of my mind. But that was just fine. No cloud stayed in front of the moon forever. Something, he said, always blows a cloud away." (155)

"He told me that Shingon was the only branch of the Buddhist faith in which it is acceptable to ask for material things and to receive them...Kukai had insisted that there was no point in not having desires or in trying to stop desires. It was important to desire something for the good of others." (156)

"In his book Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales in Japan, which has been translated into English, Kawai writes, "In the West, the hero's virtue is rewarded by a happy ending. But in Japan, beautiful endings are much preferred to happy endings." Beauty is the ultimate democracy, because a beautiful thing, particularly if it exists in nature, belongs to everyone.
..The simplest definition of wabi sabi is that it is a kind of beauty whose highest form is expressed through imperfection. The venerable art historian Miyeko Murase instructed her students to consider that a full moon glowing brightly in the sky is undeniably beautiful. But how much more beautiful is the moon when it is partially obscured by a bit of cloud? ...The Japanese love the beauty of cherry blossoms in the spring. However, say the aesthetes, how much more beautiful are the cherry trees when they are just past their peak, and petals begin to drip-drop onto the ground.
Kawai writes in his book, "The Japanese fairy tales tell us that the world is beautiful and that beauty is completed only if we accept the existence of death." Beauty heals us. But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that perfected beauty is any kind of true antidote to suffering, for everything is always changing, never holding fast to its shape. Everything must one day die, and we are all always only just passing through. So it is that we might heal a bit by experiencing the passing beauty of a dance gesture, a fading ghost, or a flower. (262)

"The point of Buddhism," he said, "is that it is natural to live with wounds. Everyone has wounds and will be wounded. This can be shocking at first, but in fact is completely normal."
Minami had suffered from intense asthmas a child, and the attacks had made him ponder illness and death from an early age. Only Buddhism, he said, had offered any kind of answer to suffering. He repeatedly insisted to me that if he ever found another philosophy that could address the troubles of human existence, he would happily embrace it...
He made it very clear that Buddhism was different from Christianity, which stressed the idea of original sin. That it was natural to live with suffering was, he said, an entirely different concept than original sin, which implied that there was something not quite right with human beings. On the contrary, he said. Things were right and things were wrong, but this dichotomy didn't get at the heart of the human experience. To live with pain was entirely normal. Once a person accepted this, he or she could get on with life. (293)

"When I traveled around Japan on the tour of Obon ceremonies, I repeatedly asked my ancestors to "make me feel more happy than sad." In a way, that was what had happened, but with one very important difference. It was not that my sadness had shrunk so much, or that my happiness had grown; instead, I now saw my own sadness in the context of everyone else's grief. I am, after all, just one person on a planet of millions, all of whom, if they have not already, will also suffer the same intense feelings of shock and loss that I have, and many of whom will do so in far more traumatic settings. My little lantern of grief was but one in a sea of other lanterns.
I couldn't help but think about Minami's observation that as a Westerner, I would always want to know why I was doing something. I would never be willing to just go through an experience and then learn the lesson at the end. That would feel too passive. Grieving, I thought, was the perfect example of just such as experience. I had been angry to be so sad so much of the time, unable to trust that in time I would recover and adapt to the lessons of grief. ...more

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Dec 05, 2015 Jennifer Rolfe rated it really liked it

I savored this book too (as other reviewers have said) and I also enjoyed the detailed history of Buddhism in Japan. Her experiences and encounters with people on her journey through Japan (her mother's homeland) were delightful. I feel I learned so much from this book and it all happened in such a way that I felt at the end that I had experienced the process of the cherry blossoms blooming and dying. I was aware of her grief and her struggle with coming to terms with the sudden death of her fat ...more

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Jul 28, 2015 Janet rated it liked it

This book made clear to me how grieving is expressed so differently between people and cultures. The stories gave rich meaning to festivals that I have experienced in Japan but failed to understand the symbolism. There were fascinating insights to religious practices far beyond text book descriptions of Buddhism and Shintoism. It is difficult to understand the impact of a disaster such as the recent tsunami and radiation leak without the intimate stories provided by the author following her exte ...more

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Dec 03, 2014 Audrey rated it really liked it

I am very interested in Japan and especially how they are dealing with the aftermath of the tsunami. I am also very interested in Buddhism and Shintoism and other "ism"s of Eastern religion. Mockett does a superb job of engaging and informing the reader on these topics, while she chronicles her visits to Japanese temples to discover what she can about her Japanese roots. However she is a bit rambling and I struggled a time or two wondering where we were going now. ...more

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Jan 26, 2015 Susan rated it really liked it

This sweet book follows the author's journeys to her relative's Buddhist temple and then to a number of other temples of some repute. The driving question is to discover the resources in culture, religion, custom and folklore that shape and address grief. A fascinating encounter with Japan by one uniquely qualified to see it. ...more

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Nov 14, 2015 Keturah Stickann rated it it was amazing

Beautiful book. Touched on so many of the themes that I'm going through right now in terms of death, dying, ghosts, collective grief vs. individual grief, but was also a poetic travelogue of post-Fukushima Japan. I thoroughly enjoyed it. ...more

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Jul 01, 2018 Bookslut rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dead-baby

I really liked this, and it was packed full of interesting things to learn. The structure was a little unclear, as if she wasn't sure how to connect or chonologize all of the different things she wanted to touch on. But I can forgive her that, especially since it didn't impede my motivation--for much of it, I couldn't put it down. I found some of the reflections on grieving insightful, but there wasn't nearly as much of that in here as I expected. I saw it as more of an exploration of Japanese c I really liked this, and it was packed full of interesting things to learn. The structure was a little unclear, as if she wasn't sure how to connect or chonologize all of the different things she wanted to touch on. But I can forgive her that, especially since it didn't impede my motivation--for much of it, I couldn't put it down. I found some of the reflections on grieving insightful, but there wasn't nearly as much of that in here as I expected. I saw it as more of an exploration of Japanese culture and manners, and it was fascinating. The way she chose to end the book was kind of bizarre, and I'm not sure why she found the tableau she ended with so meaningful, but it was fine. It didn't take away from the rest of the book.

The one thing I was disappointed in was that a paragraph in the beginning really peaked my interest:

In the news coverage of Japan immediately after the nuclear power plant accident, Westen reporters praised the Japanese for their stoicism and their selflessness and marveled at the Japanese for being so meticulous in their clean-up efforts. This was true admiration. But I also knew it meant something else. I knew reporters were also asking, "How can they do this?" How could fifty volunteers go into Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant to do cleanup? I knew what the Western reporters were thinking but not saying. They were thinking, "You are not quite human, and that is why you are not afraid. I admire you, but I could not be you."

That is a really thought-rich and daring thing to say, and the book does not really touch much on this topic, or do a lot to explore it. I was really interested in her opinions and exploration of it, especially as a Japanese-American woman, but it never came, and definitely not directly.

I did, as an unexpected boon, get a fairly detailed walk-through of Japanese cremation, which is indirectly how I arrived at checking this book out in the first place. And there was a great quote about Buddhism and grieving at the end:

"The point of Buddhism," he said, "is that it is natural to live with wounds. Everyone has wounds and will be wounded. This can be shocking at first, but in fact it is completely normal." And so it was with grieving, he said. Intense grieving was recognition of this wound, and it always took a person some time to grow accustomed to it. ...more

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Dec 31, 2016 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-memoir

A terrific book to read if you are a Westerner visiting Japan. Also simply a great book.

One of those things they don't tell you about growing up is that, as an adult, you are enveloped in an inexplicable sense of good feeling far less frequently than when younger. But I was so enveloped during my recent (first) trip to Japan, which is probably the very definition of a successful vacation. The Long-Suffering Wife, meanwhile, was reading this book and finding it intensified her similar sense of va ...more

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Jul 24, 2020 Gerry O'Malley rated it liked it · review of another edition

This book has moments of beautiful writing and entire chapters that are full of fascinating and heartbreaking stories but as a whole, it is disjointed and disorganized. It seems like Mockett started off writing a book about the survivors and the dead of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami but ran out of material to write about (as difficult as that might be). She fills the second two-thirds of the book with essays on her travels around Japan, emphasizing ceremonies and destinations having to do wi ...more

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About Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Marie Mutsuki Mockett

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MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT was born in California to a Japanese mother and an American father. A graduate of Columbia University, she lives in San Francisco with her husband and son.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett's family owns a Buddhist temple 25 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In March 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami, radiation levels prohibited the burial of her Japanese grandfat ...more

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“The distance between losing someone and accepting that they are gone is of course the very essence of grieving,” — 1 likes

“I often felt in those days that to be stuck in grief was to feel kidnapped against one’s will and forced to go to some foreign country, all the while just longing to go back home.” — 0 likes

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