A college professor and writer returns to her hometown of Carmel, California, to care for her mother, then finds herself stranded by the pandemic. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother declining in a care facility, she becomes obsessed with reviving her mother’s garden and starts a torrid affair with an arborist. All the while, she struggles to teach (remotely) Lady Murasaki’s 11th-century novel, The Tale of Genji, which turns out to resonate eerily with the events in her life.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a second novel, Picking Bone from Ash, as well as a memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Good-bye, and a work of literary journalism, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland. A member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont who has also taught at the Colgate Writers Conference, she spent the past two years living in Japan.
What’s not to like about a very sexy literary novel that unfolds against the backdrop of multiple real-life crises: an ailing parent, an estranged spouse, a global pandemic, and a climate apocalypse?
“At this point in my life, I was tired of reading about women who were punished,” says Marie Mutsuki Mockett on the Living Writers podcast. Listen to the whole three-question interview here.