Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye: Marie Mitsuki Mockett

Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye
Marie Mitsuki Mockett
2015
316pp


Mockett, an American with a Japanese mother, has always felt a deep connection to her maternal ancestry.

Her Japanese family has run a temple for years, giving her a unique outsiders look at the inside world of Zen, and death in Japan. (For anyone unfamiliar, death is usually handled by the Buddhists, while life celebrations usually fall under the domain of Shintoism).

Add to this that her family's temple sits near the site of the 2011 disastrous earthquake and tsunami, along with the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, and you may begin to see why Mockett chose to look death straight in the eye and attempt to discover what it means to die (and survive) in Japan.

The storyline jumps back and forth and all over in time to numerous trips Mockett and members of her family make to Tohoku, and other religious centers in Japan. She undertakes short but intensive simulated monk training at Eiheiji in Fukui and Koya-san atop the mountains in south Osaka (a town I simply love). She interviews numerous people, from high level monks to survivors of all kinds. She mixes so many voices into a coherent and reasoned attempt to answer her questions: What happens when you die? What happens when you don't?

This book will put you in a mood to think about a lot of deep topics, such as death, religion and saying goodbye. Mockett guides us and allows for the reader to contemplate at an enjoyable pace.

For me, this book led me to consider many things I've seen in Japan. I've often described Japan as "Pre-psychology". This is often sighted as a negative (especially regarding suicide rates) but I have never really seen it as completely negative. This is a country that uses its folklore to teach lessons, its traditions to guide and society to control negative activity. It's not perfect of course, but it is what it is, and the end product is fascinating to say the least.

Much of this folklore and tradition was developed around the religions of Japan and exploring the religions tells you an incredible amount about the country as it stands today. In this book, with a name a bit too long for me to write over and over again, Mockett looks at the religions, traditions and culture here to attempt to understand how to handle tragedy; both her own, and the larger one where so many people perished at once on that March afternoon 7 years ago.

So, my opinion of the book as a whole...

Above all else, this book simply worked for me on a few different levels.

First, it was an enjoyable and intelligent examination of aspects of a culture and place that I love and attempt to understand as much as I can. Second, it's extremely well written, and ideas of the highest or simplest order are examined carefully and expounded on in a way most adults will grasp quickly without much background. Last, parts of this book worked as a kind of precursor to the later work of Richard Lloyd Perry in Ghosts of the Tsunami. Where Perry overall examined his subject more journalistically, Mockett did so more spiritualistically (though with such a subject they overlap at times).

I'll include here an example of the writing that I found deep and insightful. Here a monk speaks on what young people in Japan have become:

In an incident that is hard for a Westerner to understand, but which makes sense in Japan, 

a young man had arranged to have a picture taken of him lying inside of the ice-cream 

freezer in his father's convenience store after hours. He had meant just to amuse his friends

by posting it on Facebook, but the photo went viral, and there was outrage. It was 

inappropriate for the young man to put his body inside the freezer containing food.

It was dirty. People panicked; the store practiced poor hygiene. Remember in Eiheiji and 

Sojiji I was told never to touch the wooden platform that monks used as a table. Japanese

are, in general, fastidious about being clean. The outrage against the freezer boy was so

strong that the franchise from whom his father operated the store revoked its permit.

The family had been forced to close down the business. "And for What?" my Japanee 

friends had said to me. "He was trying to perform. He was trying to appear like an 

interesting character." And this, I assume, was what Minami meant: people in Japan 

were less and less interested in the essential truths about their natures, but instead were

 concerned too much with their external appearance and the worth of their personas. 

I find this to be true about people far older than the freezer boy and far far outside Japan.

Mockett has one other book available, 2011's Picking Bones from Ash, which appears to be a fictional tale that may look at some of the same topics and will be put in my shopping cart, right... now.

Highly recommended as a sad but smart and enjoyable read.

                                          Pick of Mockett in Tohoku

Grab a copy:

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