The View From Breast Pocket Mountain
Book Review by Linda Gould
The View From Breast Pocket Mountain
by Karen Hill Anton
It's an act of audacity for an author to start a memoir explaining that the raw materials of the trade—photos, diaries, and memorabilia—were lost when her childhood home burned to the ground. But we learn throughout Karen Hill Anton's memoir The View From Breast Pocket Mountain that she is an audacious woman, and despite the lack of memory prompts that such stories rely on, her book never for a moment lacks in detail or in remarkable anecdotes that a reader expects to find in a memoir. What Anton accomplishes without such materials is the ability to tell her story with authentic passion and emotion that accompany her real memories.
In The View From Breast Pocket Mountain, Anton guides us through the typical events so many women experience—love, family, childbirth, loss—, but what passes for commonplace occurrences in most of our lives are extraordinary in hers. No ordinary birth for her first daughter; Anton was living in Denmark and dancing into the wee hours when her labor pains started. She was so exhausted, she fell asleep between contractions. Every person deals with the death of a loved one; few need to cope with such violent deaths as Anton did. And only a handful of the foreigners who have come to Japan arrived, as Anton and her husband did, to live a highly-disciplined and monastic life at a yoga and martial arts dojo. It seems when reading Anton’s memoir that no event in Anton’s life was ordinary. Even her first apartment in Manhattan, when she graduated high school, was next door to Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. Heller ended up hiring Anton to transcribe the dialogue from Catch-22 so he could prepare the screenplay. Details, like a teen-age Anton talking with Joseph Heller on a Fire Island beach, offer glimpses into how even the day-to-day activities of some people are elevated to being memoir-worthy.
Anton writes about living as a young woman in Europe and the United States, and she details a fascinating trip in a VW Beetle from Amsterdam to Afghanistan during the early 1970s. But most of her memoir focuses on her life in Japan, where she started out in the aforementioned dojo before moving to a remote farmhouse in the mountains of Shizuoka. And although the “view” of the title is based on her experiences as a foreigner living in the Japanese countryside, it is really a view into Anton’s nature, into a personality that enables a foreigner to weave herself and her foreigner family into Japanese society. It’s a view into how her curiosity about the world, and especially her adopted country of Japan, helped her integrate into the community, but she is not shy about including the limits she faced and the deep sense of loneliness that made her seek counseling from a therapist in a land notorious for not dealing with mental health. Anton’s story is a showcase for a character who is both independent—choosing to live in a primitive mountain home with no heat, running water or indoor plumbing— and adaptable—living in a primitive mountain home with no heat, running water or indoor plumbing! One story that stood out was that her husband--with the help of a neighbor--had to empty their outdoor, built-in-the ground toilet.
Anton was a columnist for the Japan Times where she wrote about life as a foreign woman in Japan, and her memoir is the book every expat wants to write, full of experiences that anyone who has lived in Japan will share a laugh about and even reminisce about their own adventures. And therein lies the magic of The View From Breast Pocket Mountain. It’s relatable. While her experiences were extraordinary, they will provoke memories in many visitors and expats. There’s something special about reading a story where you can say to yourself, “Hey, something like that happened to me!”
Anton’s is an inspirational story of a woman who embodies the adage “Live life to its fullest” and testament to how not being afraid to take risks leads to a remarkable life. She ends her book with self-reflection, with the acknowledgement that she still calls herself a New Yorker despite not having lived there for fifty years, with thoughtful commentary on how her life experiences and the many people she met around the world influenced her.
It’s a story with a lesson for us all, because Anton didn’t have a background of privilege. She was, in so many ways, just like most of us, ordinary. What made her life extraordinary? Curiosity, an open mind and a dash of audacity.
Book details
The View From Breast Pocket Mountain
by Karen Hill Anton
Senyume Press
Available on Amazon
by Karen Hill Anton
It's an act of audacity for an author to start a memoir explaining that the raw materials of the trade—photos, diaries, and memorabilia—were lost when her childhood home burned to the ground. But we learn throughout Karen Hill Anton's memoir The View From Breast Pocket Mountain that she is an audacious woman, and despite the lack of memory prompts that such stories rely on, her book never for a moment lacks in detail or in remarkable anecdotes that a reader expects to find in a memoir. What Anton accomplishes without such materials is the ability to tell her story with authentic passion and emotion that accompany her real memories.
In The View From Breast Pocket Mountain, Anton guides us through the typical events so many women experience—love, family, childbirth, loss—, but what passes for commonplace occurrences in most of our lives are extraordinary in hers. No ordinary birth for her first daughter; Anton was living in Denmark and dancing into the wee hours when her labor pains started. She was so exhausted, she fell asleep between contractions. Every person deals with the death of a loved one; few need to cope with such violent deaths as Anton did. And only a handful of the foreigners who have come to Japan arrived, as Anton and her husband did, to live a highly-disciplined and monastic life at a yoga and martial arts dojo. It seems when reading Anton’s memoir that no event in Anton’s life was ordinary. Even her first apartment in Manhattan, when she graduated high school, was next door to Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. Heller ended up hiring Anton to transcribe the dialogue from Catch-22 so he could prepare the screenplay. Details, like a teen-age Anton talking with Joseph Heller on a Fire Island beach, offer glimpses into how even the day-to-day activities of some people are elevated to being memoir-worthy.
Anton writes about living as a young woman in Europe and the United States, and she details a fascinating trip in a VW Beetle from Amsterdam to Afghanistan during the early 1970s. But most of her memoir focuses on her life in Japan, where she started out in the aforementioned dojo before moving to a remote farmhouse in the mountains of Shizuoka. And although the “view” of the title is based on her experiences as a foreigner living in the Japanese countryside, it is really a view into Anton’s nature, into a personality that enables a foreigner to weave herself and her foreigner family into Japanese society. It’s a view into how her curiosity about the world, and especially her adopted country of Japan, helped her integrate into the community, but she is not shy about including the limits she faced and the deep sense of loneliness that made her seek counseling from a therapist in a land notorious for not dealing with mental health. Anton’s story is a showcase for a character who is both independent—choosing to live in a primitive mountain home with no heat, running water or indoor plumbing— and adaptable—living in a primitive mountain home with no heat, running water or indoor plumbing! One story that stood out was that her husband--with the help of a neighbor--had to empty their outdoor, built-in-the ground toilet.
Anton was a columnist for the Japan Times where she wrote about life as a foreign woman in Japan, and her memoir is the book every expat wants to write, full of experiences that anyone who has lived in Japan will share a laugh about and even reminisce about their own adventures. And therein lies the magic of The View From Breast Pocket Mountain. It’s relatable. While her experiences were extraordinary, they will provoke memories in many visitors and expats. There’s something special about reading a story where you can say to yourself, “Hey, something like that happened to me!”
Anton’s is an inspirational story of a woman who embodies the adage “Live life to its fullest” and testament to how not being afraid to take risks leads to a remarkable life. She ends her book with self-reflection, with the acknowledgement that she still calls herself a New Yorker despite not having lived there for fifty years, with thoughtful commentary on how her life experiences and the many people she met around the world influenced her.
It’s a story with a lesson for us all, because Anton didn’t have a background of privilege. She was, in so many ways, just like most of us, ordinary. What made her life extraordinary? Curiosity, an open mind and a dash of audacity.
Book details
The View From Breast Pocket Mountain
by Karen Hill Anton
Senyume Press
Available on Amazon
Linda Gould is the Managing Editor of White Enso and an on again, off again writer. Her work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and online. She is the host and reader of the Kaidankai, a podcast of supernatural stories, and the author of The Diamond Tree, a dual-language book in English and Japanese.
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