Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Not sure what to make of this. Despite many interesting bits of writing, the end result was just kind of an unformed lump of information. There are really no conclusions drawn from the topics covered, and no answers to the questions discussed. I don't really see the point of the book.

I found many aspects extremely frustrating. Discussing modern farming without mentioning climate change and water management? How is it even possible to gloss over those fundamental issues? There's a brief section about the farming monoculture, but the concerns are immediately dismissed by saying that farmers raise more than one crop. That's not the point at all. The point is that vast portions of the earth's surface have been converted from a diverse ecosystem of hundreds or thousands of species to just a few species, with disastrous consequences for wildlife, insects, invertebrates, and ultimately humans.

The questions around religion and politics, though discussed at length, are not really looked at in any depth. The slices of Christianity examined are likewise extremely narrow and superficial.

The book promised a lot more than it delivered. Very disappointing.
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An interesting one this. At times it felt like the Lonely Planet Guide for Japan and at other times a Buddhist Primer and at other times like a poignant memoir. Like a lot of Japanese stuff I constantly felt like I was missing a bit or that there was a gap running all the way though it like a small silence.

The author, who is half Japanese seems to have experienced the same kind of feeling through most of her journeys too. The constant reminders to her that: "only the Japanese would understand that" only seemed to add to the otherworldness of this book.

Having been through the New Zealand Christchurch earthquakes in 2011 I felt that shadow of disaster as she recounts some of the statistics of the small places she visits like: "the waves here were 100 foot tall and 10,000 people died here". It is tempting to say that the Christchurch earthquakes were nothing compared to what happened in Japan, and on a statistical level that is true. But in terms of the shadow left on your spirit I am not sure that size matters at all when it comes to human response to disaster.

And this is a book about disaster, in a way it is a book for all those souls lost, both the ones missed and the ones that no-one survived to miss them. A book for all the lost bodies, remans that were never recovered and never will be. A book for all those who had no body to bury. A book about how a nation that has such strict protocols about death is dealing with a situation that doesn’t account for something like a protocol. It is also a book about displacement, longing and remembering.

I found it strangely moving and strangely repressed at the same time. It is not a simple book although it is easy to read. I guess that's it really.… (más)

Won from Firstreads. I was really looking forward to reading this book. While reading it I kept wavering between whether it should get 2 stars or 3. At times it flowed well, and I felt like I was really getting to know the characters. At other times, I found myself re-reading sections because there was a jump in time or a change in voice. Changing between Satomi and Rumi telling the story worked in some ways because we got each character's voice, but the transitions seemed abrupt and jarring. In the end I settled on 3 stars because I did enjoy the story and seeing the differences between 3 generations of women raised in an ever-expanding world reminded me a little bit of my own family.… (más)

A spectacular and totally absorbing novel about several generations of Japanese woman seeking to find and reestablish connections with their mothers and their pasts.

“Picking bones from ash” refers to the traditional Japanese practice of carefully removing the bones from ashes, with chop sticks, during special rituals involving cremation and burial. It is critical to one of the subplots in this book. Subtly it is a major theme in the book, symbolizing the search for the piece of one’s mother that a daughter carries forth into her own life. At a more universal level, the image suggests the process of finding and retaining what is true and important from the past for each of us.

Read more: http://wp.me/p24OK2-1nP… (más)