Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born to an American father and a Japanese mother. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award. Her forthcoming work, A Kernel in God’s Eye, was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award.
The taxi driver who took me from Tokyo train station to my hotel had turned his cell phone sideways, like a television, and propped it up on the dashboard of his car. He was watching a historical ...