I saw the cover of this novel on CoverSpy and really liked the Brownstone-Brooklyn-meets-Hokusai design, so when I saw it at the library, I checked it out. The first-person narrator is sixty-ish Seido Oda, who was born in a small village in the mountains in rural Japan: he tells of how his parents were innkeepers, how he had three siblings, how, as a child, he was accepted as an acolyte at a local Buddhist temple. He talks about leaving his home and his village:
I was eleven years old and the ties to my family and my home, even to Katsurao, had been abruptly cut with a ritual knife and a simple cascade of shikimi leaves, for the word “priest” means “leaving home and entering not-home.” (19)
This separation from home turns out to be permanent: after a time in Tokyo and a time back at the monastery, Reverend Oda is sent to Brooklyn, where the sect he is part of is planning to build a temple. Once Oda is in New York, the story becomes one in part of culture shock, which is about humor and sometimes about the things that Oda learns (like: not to judge by appearances/first impressions). There are also threads of the story about Oda’s ministry to various Believers in New York, and the help he is or isn’t able to give them.
I expected to like this book a little more than I actually did. One thing I found hugely distracting was the way the Brooklyn setting was handled. Some neighborhoods and places appear with their real names (Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, the bar that’s called the People’s Republic of Brooklyn) while others don’t (Court Street becomes Cortina Street, Smith Street becomes Castor Street, and the neighborhood where Oda lives, which is clearly a version of Carroll Gardens, complete with the park with the bocce courts, isn’t named as such). I understand wanting a fictionalized version of a place, but I would have liked a fictionalized Court Street that was called that. I also think that I might have liked a book with a slightly different balance of setting/description and plot and character. There were some great descriptive passages when Oda is in Japan and when he’s in New York, and also some great bits of haiku (Oda quoting Issa and Basho; Oda writing his own), and I would have liked more of that. Or maybe I just needed to be reading more slowly/less distractedly, to better appreciate those parts that were there: this was another during-breaks-at-jury-duty read so it’s hard for me to tell which failings were the book’s and which were mine.
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