Marie Mutsuki Mockett sits on the edge of things to get a better view. She makes maps of places we don’t yet know exist. She loves humor, hard won clarity and unusual color combinations. Best known as a writer, she is also a traveler, teacher, and general maker of things. Born to an American father and Japanese mother, she grew up on the Central Coast of California, learning English in kindergarten as her third language.

She is the author of four books—two works of nonfiction and two novels. A fifth book is in progress.

Her newest novel, The Tree Doctor (Graywolf Press, 2024), is a story of obsession, aging, and beautiful but wild California. Set in Carmel, California, the narrative is refracted through the protagonist’s struggle to understand Lady Murasaki’s thousand-year-old Tale of Genji—while balancing care for others with care for herself.

Her nonfiction book, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the American Heartland (Graywolf Press, 2020), follows her journey across seven U.S. heartland states in the company of evangelical Christian harvesters. It explores whether true conversation is possible between city and country, Christian and atheist, liberal and conservative. American Harvest won the 2021 Northern California Book Award for General Nonfiction and the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction.

Her earlier memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye (W.W. Norton, 2016), explores how the Japanese navigate grief and tragedy. Set in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Tōhoku—and anchored in her family’s 350-year-old Buddhist temple—it was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.

Other works include the novel Picking Bones from Ash and the widely anthologized essay “Letter from a Japanese Crematorium,” featured in Best Creative Nonfiction 3 (W.W. Norton). Her essays and reporting have appeared in Orion, The New York Times, National Geographic, Salon, Glamour, and elsewhere. She has been a guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, The World, and All Things Considered. In 2023, she served as Consulting Producer for the Netflix documentary Encounters, which explored the UFO phenomenon in four countries—including Japan.

Mockett was a 2022–2023 Fulbright Fellow to Japan, where she was based in Tokyo. She has received fellowships from the NEA /U.S.–Japan Friendship Commission, as well as a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship and residencies at UCross and the Dora Maar House. With Kiese Laymon, she was series editor to the recently founded Great Circle Books, an imprint of UNC Press dedicated to literature that explores the relationship between place and the human experience.

She teaches fiction and nonfiction in the MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars and has previously taught at Saint Mary’s College of California and the Rainier Writing Workshop. In 2025, she taught at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Her current project, Tokyo Future Past, once again draws on her dual heritage to bring the vibrant, layered city of Tokyo to life. With attention to tea ceremonies, feudal ghosts, fashion districts, and the seasonal textures of daily life, the book explores Tokyo as both the world’s largest metropolis and a deeply intimate terrain.

Photo by Sylvie Rosokoff

Photo of Johnangu shrine in Kyoto with plums and fallen camellias on moss, by Marie