On literary prizes

by Maud | February 8th, 2013

At the New York Times’ Room for Debate, some of my thoughts on literary prizes. (And on only recently discovering Rabindranath Tagore.)

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The Begats

At NPR, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, discusses what we in the West call the loss of her father, and also his continuing presence.

The Japanese believe that we are connected to our ancestors and … I heard a lot of, “Oh, your father knows this. Your father knows that. Your father is watching.” … I used to dream about my father constantly, and it was always the same dream: He would always come to see me in my childhood room, and I would have to tell him that he was dead. And he would look very disappointed and sorry that he had died, and then he would go away.

In my kind of Western, psychoanalytic mind I thought, “Oh, I’m processing the fact that he’s dead and that my brain can’t accept that he’s gone, and that’s what I’m doing.” Now I have these dreams about him — and he occasionally would show up, and it’s always with some sort of, very specific, important message. I had a really powerful one last summer where he showed up and he said, “You need to be living your life a little bit differently than you are. This is not the way I want you to live your life.”

I’m open to this idea that … he’s still present in a significant way. … His guidance and his wisdom — that’s still in me. And that is something that the Japanese believe. But I guess I found a way to believe that and to integrate that into a way that works for me. … I’m not one of those people who can believe in a spirit plane, or believe that I can actually conjure his spirit, or anything truly … metaphysical. Metaphorical, I can accept. And that is something that I definitely learned from Japan and feel comfortable with.

01/28/15

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