BOOK REVIEW
Reading “The View From Breast Pocket Mountain”
Karen Hill Anton’s lovely memoir of building a life in the Japanese countryside
As a novelist and fiction lover, I rarely read memoirs. I find most either self-aggrandizing to the point of absurdity or too ordinary to be interesting. But The View From Breast Pocket Mountain by Karen Hill Anton is perfect. It’s a fascinating story of a woman from humble beginnings from New York City who ends up building a life in the deepest countryside of Japan.
During the freewheeling 70's, Anton traveled for a year with her husband and a young daughter in a VW bug, slowly making their way across Europe and Asia to Japan where her husband had a 1 year apprenticeship to study yoga, martial arts, and Eastern healing at a dojo in Shizuoka, in the shadow of Mt. Fuji.
At the monastic and extremely strict dojo, not only was her husband expected to train all day and most of the night, but so was Anton and her young daughter. When the apprenticeship was nearly finished, they decided to leave the dojo, but stay in Shizuoka. That brief visit, temporary in nature, turned into nearly 50 years in Shizuoka and still counting.
One of the other members of the Dojo introduced her to a relative who owned an old, isolated…
