Picking Bones from Ash

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. Satomi's success in piano competitions has always saved her and her mother from complete ostracism. But when her mother's growing ambition tests this delicate social balance, Satomi's gift is not enough to protect them. Years later, Satomi's fate echoes in the life of her American daughter, Rumi, who has grown up without her mother. But when Rumi begins to see a ghost, she wonders: Is this the spirit of her mother? If so, what happened to Satomi? 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 to one another.

Praise

"Remarkable and arresting, this debut has the pleasures of a fairy tale and a novel at the same time . . . A spellbinding new talent."—Alexander Chee

 

"I don't know when I last read a novel with two such captivating heroines as Marie Mutsuki Mockett conjures up in her intricate and absorbing novel Picking Bones from Ash. Like Satomi and Rumi, Mockett is 'fiercely, inarguablym and masterfully talented.' An immensely satisfying debut."—Margot Livesey

 

"Mockett has made an impressive debut with Picking Bones from Ash. Here, she creates a fully absorbing world with vivid characters who search for what was painfully lost to them. Mockett is a beautiful writer."—Min Jin Lee

 

"In her richly imagined debut novel, Marie Mutsuki Mockett writes of three generations of mother and daughters who are bound by their 'inherited history,' one filled with the struggles and ghosts of their past. Steeped in the culture and traditions of Japan, Picking Bones from Ash is a captivating read from a striking new talent."—Gail Tsukiyama

 

"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 live web of human relationships and everyday tasks. 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 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This wiry and delicate novel, as grounded as it is surreal, goes down like a tall glass of water. Except it's spiked: like Rumi, the younger of Mockett's two heroines, you will be haunted until you finish this book."—Ellis Avery

 

"In this ambitious debut, the narration alternates between Satomi, a Japanese girl pushed by her mother to make her mark on the world, and Rumi, Satomi's American daughter who grows up in the mid-late 1960s believing her mother is dead . . . Rumi's quest to unravel her tricky family history is absorbing . . . Mockett succeeds where many others fail: making the reader care."—Publishers Weekly

 

 

About the Author(s)

Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born in California to a Japanese mother and an American father. A graduate of Columbia University, she lives in New York City with her husband. This is her first novel.