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

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 show more 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. show less

Her father is American, her mother Japanese, and some of the Japanese family have charge of a Buddhist temple 25 miles from the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Mockett visits Japan some time after the disaster, when radiation levels have dropped enough that the family can bury her grandfather. Her American father had also died during that time.
She visits family and temples and has trivial and profound conversations with Zen priests and ordinary Japanese, around death and its rituals. There’s material about some esoteric Buddhism that I’d been curious about. I enjoyed it very much.

A touching look at Japanese ways of dealing with grief. Fascinating. Not much about the tsunami, more about living with loss. I loved her look at the seasons as she grieved for family members. A very interesting look at just one small aspect of Japanese culture.

Very moving. Learned a lot about Japanese religion and culture.

Beautiful.