Marie Mutsuki Mockett on Writing in Times of Sickness and Health

Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s The Tree Doctor is an erotic, emotionally resonant and sensually explicit story of one woman’s odyssey through the deprivations, isolation, uncertainties and anxieties of a pandemic. Lockdown leads to unexpected discoveries as she opens up to plants, birds, animals, breezes, and the pleasures of the body. “Can you wake up a body the way you can wake up a tree?” she asks at one point. The Tree Doctor is influenced by Mockett’s mother and her Japanese culture.

Her 2020 book, American Harvest, was written after she inherited her father’s Nebraska wheat farm and embedded herself in a group of Evangelical Christian wheat harvesters, experiencing shifting cultural perspectives in their travels. Both books are compassionate lyrical accounts that offer precious insights into our life as humans in these times. Our email conversation reached from California near the novel’s setting in Carmel to Japan.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have your life and work been affected by recent years of pandemic and tumult? Have you experienced the dislocations, separations from family, isolation and lockdowns as described in The Tree Doctor? How were the writing and launch of your previous book, American Harvest, published in April 2020, affected?

Marie Mutsuki Mockett: My mother died of Covid during the pandemic, on my birthday. Really, most everything in my life now stems from that. I had seen her the day before and told her that the next day would be my birthday and I believe she waited to be there with me one more time. Now I’ve started crying as I type this. Each birthday is now quite painful. She died during that period of the pandemic when you had to wear scrubs and a shield to see someone in the hospital and you only got to see them if they were dying. There was a fifteen-minute limit. Writing this is now making me start to panic. I am not sure I will ever get over what happened and I will never stop thinking how else I might have handled what happened.

I have a list of things I want to do before I die. I have a list of things she wanted to do before she died and that she wanted to do with me and with my son. I do not like to waste time and I do not like to get sick and waste time.

As you note in your question, I had a book come out during the pandemic; some exciting things planned for the book never happened. It has always been hard to swallow how my ambition does not match the reality of my career; I am someone who was shocked by #publishingpaidme, for example, and left Twitter shortly after because I have never had a “raise,” and I kept seeing how my peers, with whom I had thought I was keeping pace, were making three times what I was.

It is hard to be told repeatedly by the market that you have almost no value. But I was really proud of American Harvest, which I still think was a book ahead of its time, asking how we might all actually try to live together. I still receive emails for this book, from people who thank me for it, because they, too, want to know how we can all live together.

To cope with the feeling of sudden restriction and further loss of opportunity for my book in my life, I started writing a separate book while American Harvest “launched.” I would like to say that I recognize that many people’s lives and projects were curtailed by the pandemic and I am not alone and in many ways, I was very fortunate. I had a safe place to go during the entire pandemic.

JC: What inspired you to write The Tree Doctor? When did you begin? When did you end?

MMM: I was talking to Al Heathcock when I started writing. I told him I had an idea for a novel, even though I planned never to write another novel again. I thought if I kept the cast small, I could finish a draft in a few months and if the novel didn’t work, I would not have wasted my time. I continue to live with the fear that what I write will be rejected; this happens in publishing all the time. I watch close friends and peers fail to sell novels, particularly if, like me, they are not “famous.” Then you can sell anything.

I remember finishing the book in a matter of weeks, before revising it. I think I had done two drafts within four or five months. My email tells me I started in May of 2020 and submitted it to my agent by December. Then I had to wait to hear back from her, because five other writers had done the same thing as me; I guess when the pandemic hit, a bunch of us started writing.

As for the actual inspiration, someone made a post on Twitter that was something along the lines of: “All those people having affairs before the pandemic are now screwed.” I thought that was interesting. I started gardening as soon as possible, during the pandemic, because I could see I needed to do something to hold off massive depression. The local garden center was open; the dialogue in the book is essentially the conversation I had over the phone about fuchsias. When I got to the garden center, there was a nice man with a bandana helping all these (mostly) older women with their plants and I thought; what a great premise for a novel based on the inverse of that Twitter tweet.

JC: The novel centers around a woman who has left her husband and two daughters in Hong Kong to return to Carmel, California, where she was raised. She is visiting her mother, who has been diagnosed with dementia and is in an assisted living facility. How did the pandemic, with its familial disruptions due to mandatory lockdowns, influence this novel?

MMM: My mother first became “sick” when I was ten years old. My grandmother was arriving from Japan for her first every visit to America, which was a big deal because my grandparents had initially disowned my mother when she married my father. My mother said she didn’t feel well the morning of my grandmother’s arrival, so my dad took me to the SF airport to pick up my grandmother; I was the translator. When we came home, there was a note in the house that my mother was at the ICU. That summer, I went to Japan alone to be with my grandparents, to give my parents time to work on her recovery.

I spent many years being vigilant over my mother’s health, which she never fully regained. I went to many doctors, surgeries and specialists on her behalf. I am feeling the panic again as I type. After my father died, I became the caretaker. I already had a child and it was a challenge to care for them both. I don’t think I was a good caretaker. But I know what illness is and I know why it’s important to enjoy life. Sometimes I cannot appreciate being alive and enjoying having a body. Sometimes I am more afraid of possible illnesses and suffering than I am, in the moment, able to just enjoy being alive and that’s I’m sure because I’m sort of anxious as a person, but also because of decades of trying to outsmart any potential virus or accident that might take my mother away.

At the same time, I love to hike, travel, take pictures, dance and, recently, to ski. I would say skiing is the only physical activity (okay, maybe a great dance class) that rivals sex in making me happy to have a body. But I sometimes find it hard to stay in that state. I know there are people—I’ve met them—who have no idea what I’m talking about and just love being alive and being physical and think bodies are awesome. I am someone who sometimes inhabits my body, and sometimes does not. I’m sure that’s because I’m a person who sometimes loves being alive and sometimes is terrified to suffer and die.

The pandemic thrust all these emotions into sharp relief. My narrator has this same struggle. I can’t say that she has my exact history, but we share enough emotional background that I understand her. She deals with it by, for once in her life, having lots of great sex. I hope people out there also dealt with the pandemic by having lots of great sex, and I don’t judge them if they did.

JC: Have your Fulbright years in Japan influenced your work on The Tree Doctor?

MMM: Absolutely. This answer is difficult to compress into an interview response, but I’m in Japan. My mother was Japanese. She’s not here with me, navigating and interpreting the culture for me. I have to do this on my own, for myself, and for my son. A question I always wonder is: what is it to be Japanese? Being here I wrestle with this question every day. Some of the things I have thought about as a result are in The Tree Doctor. I’ll just leave it at that.

JC: Your protagonist is a writer and also is teaching her Hong Kong class remotely, with a focus on Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, written by an anonymous female courtier, and set during the Heian era, Japan’s golden age (which was bookended by plagues). When did you first read The Tale of Genji? Have you taught it? How has it influenced your work, and the structure and thematic texture of The Tree Doctor?

MMM: I have never taught The Tale of Genji and honestly, I would feel a strong case of imposter syndrome if I did. However, it has occurred to me lately that I could lead a really good discussion, with guests and friends I have made who know more than I do. I have met a number of women in Japan who have Tale of Genji reading circles and they just read and study and read this book over and over, which you can, because it bears rereading. It is truly iterative.

And it used to be that I would go to a museum with an exhibition of Japanese art, and there was always some Genji related piece on display, and I would admire it because it would invariably be pretty. But I wouldn’t have any sense of what it meant. Now, in Japan, when I go to these exhibits, I get more and more references and the nuances behind them. I also invariably find myself standing with other women who have Genji reading circles, who are doing the same kind of deciphering that I am.

Recently I wrote about what Genji means to me in the simplest terms; long before New York publishing and American identity politics, there was a Japanese woman writing the world’s first novel. My mother told me this when I was around fourteen when we went to visit some of the places associated with Murasaki Shikibu. It became my secret source of confidence. Even today when an editor says “Too many place names in Japanese” or “Japanese food is really terrible” or “I can’t tell these Asian women apart,” I think about Murasaki Shikibu and her millennia long relevance and I tell myself that what is inane, is inane.

I have read the book in fits and starts, familiarizing myself with parts of it that are famous—like the moment when Genji first sees Murasaki who is crying over her lost pet bird, or Lady Rokujo’s spirit astrally projecting and killing her rival. But for The Tree Doctor, I had to do a much deeper dive, beyond superficial aesthetics and into themes and psychology, which could be challenging, since the novel was written before that kind of modern and articulated self-awareness. These recent reads were rewarding and I found my own interpretations, which you see in the book.

JC: The natural world is in many ways central to The Tree Doctor. Staying at her childhood home in Carmel, your protagonist rediscovers “an intimacy with plants she had forgotten she possessed,” based on childhood chores her mother taught her. She comes across her mother’s partial vision board, and begins a journey toward planting seeds, restoring the garden and trees that includes sharing images with her mother, who she is unable to visit due to the quarantine. How extensive is your own training in the natural world?

MMM: During the pandemic, I did find a piece of paper with the words “vision board.” I have no idea what it means. I do wonder if my mother meant to make a vision board. I grew up with very devoted parents; my mother in particular was a naturalist. She was the kind of person who would go to a new place, see a plant she liked, take a shoot, put it in her pocket and then grow it at home. Plants and animals loved her. She would always tell me she was teaching me “wisdom,” but I thought her knowledge was fairly useless for this new world of technology and branded self that I was entering. Now, of course, I think she was right.

JC: Weeding the iris bed, planting bulbs, become events of the day for your narrator in isolation. The local nursery becomes a destination, and its highly trained and finely tuned arborist becomes the advisor and guide for the treatment of her rare bristlecone cherry tree and other neglected trees. Gardening was a welcome retreat during the pandemic for many. Was this your experience?

MMM: Pretty much, though there was no tree doctor. Sadly. I removed two cherry trees and planted two new ones that are good in drought. I planted a new apple tree which gave us its first apples last year. I named the birds and watched the hawks build a nest in the pine tree behind me. I also started taking photos, which you can see in my social media; the protagonist in the novel doesn’t do this. But I started taking long walks, looking at birds, which was something my mother would have done. Actually, because of her many illnesses, she could not hike. So in a way, I rediscovered my hometown because I no longer felt guilty hiking, which I did when she was alive; I was always searching for ways to include her in experiences when she was alive.

JC: The tree doctor becomes your protagonist’s lover. In sophisticated and subtle erotic passages you trace the trajectory of their affair. What were the rules or guidelines you had in mind when writing about these sexual encounters, fantasies, and memories?

MMM: I wanted to write the sex scenes I wanted to read. I didn’t want to read any bloviating “her softness” or “he thrust his manness”…which is just embarrassing for me as a reader. There is something so compensatory about that kind of writing, like the devil on the shoulder of the writer is whispering: “Now, you need to compensate for the gentleness in this scene and you can do that by visualizing French horns blaring a processional march. Then it won’t feel so scary, and you’ll get to keep the authoritative prose for which you are known.”

And then there are the funny sex scenes, which are another kind of compensatory writing, where the devil is whispering: “I know, I know. Fluids. Just be funny all the way through and then you won’t have to take any of this seriously.” And maybe that’s how people have sex? It’s not how my character is having sex and I don’t believe it’s how most people have sex. I was writing about someone having great sex and enjoying it and so that’s how I tried to write those scenes.

JC: There is an ingenious plot twist (no spoiler!) that reframes your erotic narrative. Was this a shift you always had in mind? Or did it come up in the course of working on the novel? Was there a specific trigger?

MMM: I’m very glad to take credit for a plot twist…I’m not entirely sure I know what you mean. But I think I do? Assuming that I do, that plot twist was with me from the beginning. I guess this is also where the Tale of Genji comes in. There are over 800 poems in Genji, and many reference the natural world. In fact, the natural world tells us how the characters are feeling and the activities of birds and flowers often relate to sex. This was really brought home to me in 2020, watching the garden blossom as the pandemic moved into springtime. I thought about the elemental nature of the virus and of the flowers blooming, and related that to the “wisdom” of Genji—a kind of wisdom my mother was always trying to relay to me—and then the garden looked very different to me. I also wondered about the history of the flowering cherry tree. And all of that came together as a plot point.

JC: The class being taught early in the book only gets through the first two parts of The Tale of Genji. In a repeat of the class later in the book, three students return for a reread, and ask to be able to include the third part of the novel. This is such a fascinating twist. What does it signify? How does the younger generation read this classic book?

MMM: I think a lot of focus is on the first two parts of the book, because that’s when Genji is alive. It’s sort of like Wuthering Heights; we care a lot less when Hareton shows up, even though the Hareton section was important to Emily Bronte. My cursory reading of critical material also asked if Murasaki Shikibu (the author) finished Genji, or left it unfinished, or if her daughter wrote the later chapters. I’m not sophisticated enough to speak to any stylistic differences between the sections, but I saw something happening in the last section—which you know about—that put the end of the book in a different light. I was greatly aided in my reading by the Australian scholar Royal Tyller’s work; his essays on Genji are so smart and clear and profound, which is my favorite kind of mind. This is where the final heroine makes a different choice from all her predecessors that feels intentional to me and not, as some have suggested, an “abrupt ending.”

JC: What are you working on now/next?

MMM: I’m not sure! I have projects I am thinking about and I am contracted to write a book about California. We will see.

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The Tree Doctor by Marie Mutsuki Mockett is available from Graywolf Press.