SNA (Tokyo) — Breast Pocket Mountain by Karen Hill Anton tells a story of self-discovery in rural Japan, which fills the reader with hope. Karen, a New Yorker, ends up raising a bicultural family, becomes a writer for the Japan Times, a teacher of modern dance, and a shodo calligraphy practitioner of merit.

Her inner strength allowed her to go through a series of life chapters that were fraught with difficulties, but in the end she was always able to survive them and emerge even more resolute. Perhaps some of her most painful memories are those related to her mother’s illness and father’s death.  It was also her perseverance and spiritual strength that contributed to her mastery of the art of shodo, perhaps inspired by her father’s love of calligraphy.

Her journey in Japan sets an example on how to live gracefully regardless of what challenges fate may throw at you. “I was always ready to move on to the next thing, even when the outlines of that next thing weren’t clearly drawn, never making plans. My basic approach to life was, I’ll figure it out when I get there,” she says.

She has often said that she had a life before her rich life in Japan and therefore she wanted to tell it to her readers who only knew about her days in Breast Pocket Mountain in remote Shizuoka Prefecture.

A child of her times, Anton grew up in New York City in the late 1960s.  She grew up motherless, for her mother was diagnosed as an amnesiac and was away in a mental institution.

Despite her traumatic childhood, Anton was benefitted from the care and dedication of her father to bring out the best in his children. She had a number of serendipitous encounters along her road that may have inspired her, or at the very least put some color in her early days.

American youth in the late 1960s largely rejected their parents’ cultural standards with regards to social issues, such as racial segregation, the war in Vietnam, sexual mores, women’s rights, materialism, and food.

Anton could be said to be a child of those days. Despite the aura of freedom, the late 1960s and early 1970s weren’t all that easy to navigate for those coming of age.

By the loving way in which she describes him, her father was an extremely resourceful man, able to conjure a delicious meal for his three children out of just a few ingredients.  Her father earned himself a reputation in the neighborhood as he owned the only typewriter and was often asked to write petitions, eulogies, and the like. He was a determined man who wrote to Congressmen and newspaper editors whenever he thought that injustice was taking place.

During the 1950s, jobs were scarce and, although he was a tailor, he worked as a presser in a day cleaner.

Anton may have unknowingly inherited her father’s resourcefulness as the foundation from which she kept building her own life by adding her own skills in different cultures, such as Norway and Japan.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that after finishing high school she found work with a culinary writer from the Village Voice who enabled her to develop her taste buds, influenced her readings and broadened her musical taste. There in Greenwich Village in the center of a bohemian bubble amongst artists and creatives from all over the world, she met her future husband.

An excerpt from her book relates:

Living in Greenwich Village, I could go straight from listening to folk singers in the park all day to hanging out in Cafe Reggio where I’d order a Florentine apple tart at midnight.  Billy Anton would come by often, he lived just a few blocks away on MacDougal St. in Little Italy. He told me where to get the best Sicilian pizza and often brought me long hero sandwiches. It was then that he introduced me to Zen Buddhism, mystifying me with the kaon, “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”

What inspired her to write this book? “I think I just came to a point in my life–I’m not young–and where I thought that the life I’d lived would be interesting to other people. I knew I had many readers from my Crossing Cultures column in the Japan Times, which was very popular. I wrote for about ten years but I always knew readers were only getting part of my story and that is from my arrival in Japan and raising my children here. I had a full life before I ever got to Japan and I had quite a bit of a life after I stopped writing the column.”

From her bittersweet youth in New York City to her challenging years as a writer, mother, dancer, and calligrapher in Japan, Karen Hill Anton has lived her life with hope, strength, and grace. Her outlook on life and her rich experiences make fascinating reading in Breast Pocket Mountain.

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