Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

This wiry and delicate novel, as grounded as it is surreal, goes down like a tall glass of water. Beginning in a world as solid as Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Picking Bones from Ash takes the reader down a rabbit-hole as matter-of-factly supernatural as that of Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. 'In Marie Mockett's first novel―which ranges in confident and lovely prose from a mountain town in mid-century Japan to an antiques business in contemporary San Francisco ―temples, ghosts, and oni demons aren't inert markers of exoticism: they're embedded in a lived web of human relationships and everyday tasks.

Picking Bones from Ash is a lovely book.' ― KIT REED

'Marie Mockett brings postwar Japan into the 21st Century with sensitivity and grace, drawing the lives of three women to illuminate the tension between two cultures. Fusing imagination and suspense, Marie Mutsuki Mockett builds a lavish world in which characters journey from Buddhist temples to the black market of international antiques in California, as they struggle to understand each other across cultures and generations.

Picking Bones from Ash explores the struggles women face in accepting their talents, and asks what happens when mothers and daughters dare to question the debt owed each other. Rumi has always believed her mother to be dead, but when Rumi begins to see a ghost, she wonders: Is this the spirit of her mother? If so, what happened to Satomi? Years later, Satomi's choices echo in the life of her American daughter, Rumi, a gifted authenticator of Asian antiques. Eventually, Satomi is pushed to make a drastic decision in order to begin her life anew. But when her mother's growing ambition tests this delicate social balance, Satomi's gift is not enough to protect them. Satomi's success in piano competitions has always won respect, saving her and her mother from complete ostracism. No one knows who fathered eleven-year-old Satomi, and the women of her 1950s Japanese mountain town find her mother's restless sensuality a threat. And that is to be fiercely, inarguably and masterfully talented. My mother always told me that there is only one way a woman can be truly safe in this world.

Three generations of women intersect in this evocative debut novel

Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett