My latest Art & Kinship installment is on Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s second novel, The Tree Doctor, and her work more broadly. Also, death, ghosts, sex, and a cherry tree named Einstein. Here’s how it begins:
I first encountered Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s work in her engaging, quietly profound, and beautifully and wryly observed Letter From a Japanese Crematorium, written soon after her grandmother’s funeral. The cremation and memorial both took place at the Sōtō Buddhist Temple that’s been in the author’s family since her great-grandmother’s day. “My cousin Takahagi, a Buddhist priest, does not want me to go to the crematorium,” the essay begins. “It is not a place for visitors. When I press him, he explains: the crematorium is a gateway to the next world and is potentially dangerous…. the soul that is finally and forcibly removed from the flesh might snatch along a family member or friend for company.” As I think back on how many times I read this essay after it was published in 2007, I wonder about the seeds planted that ended up contributing to Ancestor Trouble.