Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s new novel The Tree Doctor (Graywolf Press, 2024) follows one woman in California as she shelters from the pandemic. Though this unnamed narrator had been living with her husband and two daughters as expats in Hong Kong, she returned to the United States to move her ailing mother into a nursing home. But as travel restrictions grow and lockdowns occur, she becomes stuck in the US alone, isolated in her childhood home.
This could be the beginning of a horror novel. Instead, the narrator’s story becomes one of self-discovery as she tends to her mother’s garden. At a nearby garden center, she meets a mysterious man whom she thinks of as the Tree Doctor and begins a relationship with him. Simultaneously, via Zoom, she teaches the eleventh-century text, The Tale of Genji, to a group of students and begins to learn new things about that text and the ways in which it might mirror her current situation.
We talked by phone about writing about sex, maintaining motivation in the face of disappointment, the pandemic, and about cyclical patterns in nature and culture.
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The Rumpus: The setting for the book is primarily in the unnamed narrator’s childhood home. Why was it important that she be in her mother and father’s house in California rather than with her family in Hong Kong for this story?
Marie Mutsuki Mockett: She has to be separated from her family in order for her to feel like she can do what she does. She’s separated. Her memory is working on her, and she has this childhood relationship to the environment of the book. The environment is almost like a character. If she were in Hong Kong, which is a new place, first of all, there would be far less of the natural world to explore.
She’s rediscovering many of these things that she knew as a child and then is seeing anew, now as an older person, a reexamination of nature. Her memory does intrude on her experiences, and that just has more weight if she’s someplace that she knew from when she was very young and then forgot about and then went back to because there’s an act of re-seeing that happens in this book. That requires something other than the act of discovery of something new. She’s also convinced that she’s being spoken to by her mother’s last note. She’s convinced that things are a clue and a puzzle, and she’s supposed to figure them out based on her relationship to them.
Rumpus: The vision board note.
Mockett: Yes, it’s different if you’re in a place where you’re supposed to have an existing relationship rather than a new place where you’re off on a quest. It wasn’t a quest in a new place. It was a quest in an old place.
Rumpus: Similarly, she’s sheltering from the pandemic, and as I was reading, it struck me that as she shelters, she’s living mostly in a state of solitude, yet she does not seem lonely. As she moves through the events described in the book, how is that solitude important for her journey?
Mockett: She’s a woman in what we call the middle of her life, middle age, whatever that may be, who has been frantically caring for her children and not making as much money as her husband. She’s been placing her husband’s career ahead of hers because he’s the breadwinner, negotiating what her ambitions were as a younger person with these pressures, and then the added pressure of her mother being ill and needing care.
She’s what we call “the sandwich generation.” A lot of people, I think, can relate to this time of life. There are demands that are continually placed on her and her husband, and all of a sudden, she finds herself—it’s like the Talking Heads song that asks, “Well, how did I get here?” Then all of a sudden, she’s alone, and instead of feeling scared or lonely—she doesn’t say it—but she’s quite delighted to unexpectedly find herself in a place of calm. If she thinks about the virus, and she does say that the virus is very scary to think about, the implications of it, but she is not terrified by the solitude.
The narrator is relieved that she is suddenly released from certain pressures. She takes advantage of it in a way until she starts to think, “Wait, what are the implications of me essentially existing as a mother over Zoom only?”
Rumpus: The Tale of Genji acts as a touch point for the book’s protagonist as well as a way for her to think about things like relationships and sex. Can you talk about that book’s importance for this story?
Mockett: I don’t want to give away the end of the book, but we have a narrator who has an unexpressed life and may have an unexpressed gift. I think, again, that’s a concern that one might have in the middle of one’s life: “How much time do I have left? What did I not do? What do I still need to do?” It’s a different kind of urgency than you have when you’re younger and just starting out. For her, one of the things that she’s concerned about is writing. She mentions that she had a book, she got a job teaching, and then the demands of her family and everything else just occupied all of her time and attention.
She has this idealized relationship with The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, which is often called the world’s first psychological novel, written in about 1000 AD. It is amazing because it’s a book by a woman, not a book by a man. Just that fact has always captured her attention, but it probably isn’t until this incident where she’s isolated at home and teaching the book to her students and doesn’t have the outside world intruding on her quite so much that she reconsiders what that book is about. It is very much about sex and power. It’s about a lot of different things, but she’s also thinking about the power and the powerlessness of women.
When scholars look at this book and modern readers look at this book, it’s hard to get past the beginning where so many women are romanced by Genji, the prince, the titular character, but the novelist actually is very sympathetic to the state of the women and sees them clearly, and I in reading this book felt like there was something that Lady Murasaki had to say about women and their talents that shows up at the end of the book. That’s also what our unnamed narrator discovers.
It’s interesting because I spent the summer in Kyoto, and I got to know this professor of literature who came to an event I attended that was not related to The Tale of Genji but had to do with Japanese history. I was talking about The Tale of Genji and where I felt like I could see a sign of, I don’t want to say a sign of hope but a place where a woman in this world who was so restricted in her movements was able to find freedom.
This professor said, “I think you’re reading it exactly correctly.” That was validating and exciting for me that other people read the book in that way, too, and that’s slowly what our narrator discovers as well. The narrator is in this period of respite from her family where she engages in all of these activities. She does, in fact, change the trajectory of her life, I think, in a really subtle way.
You don’t have to have some sort of grand epiphany or a grand escapade or travel around the world. She’s at home, and that’s the other reason why I set it in her childhood home, in a place that’s supposedly something she knows really well, a place that she felt she “escaped from.”
I felt that way, and I think a lot of my friends feel that way. I wanted to get out of my childhood home because I didn’t want that to define who I am. I wanted to make who I am, but she has a pretty significant internal change in this place that she felt was always restrictive.
You don’t have to have the big reality TV moment where you’re whisked to a tropical island and given a lot of stuff and plastic surgery or whatever to change your life. The changes are internal, and those can be lasting and real. I’d like to think we see that happen to this narrator. And there’s something of that also in The Tale of Genji, which is also a book that relays the reality of suffering.
Suffering is something that happens. People get sick and people get jealous and people feel pain. But then they also do experience these exquisite moments of beauty and the reality of that kind of living and the validity of it. And a person shouldn’t feel like a failure if life is filled with so much pain: this is not equated to failure. It just may be the pressure of living and the pressure of getting older, but moments of change and internal change are possible.
Rumpus: The protagonist meets a man named Dean who she thinks of as “The Tree Doctor.” There are moments in the book where she seems obsessed with him and others, like when she mentions she’s tired of eating pizza, that she appears to find him childish and annoying. Why is that ambiguity towards him important?
Mockett: I think there’s a point in the book—I actually don’t have the book in front of me, but there’s a point in the book where she wonders what she’s feeling and she remembers as a young person, you meet a guy, you go on a date, you test out the relationship, it becomes love and then you break up and there’s a pattern to relationships, but in her mind, they’ve all been centered around, “I love this person. I don’t love this person. Is this person my soul mate? Is this person not my soul mate?”
Her whole experience with the Tree Doctor doesn’t really fall under that narrative pattern, and she also says, “It’s been a really long time since I’ve had sex for the first time with somebody. It’s been a really long time since I’ve had an encounter with somebody.” Her late forties, early fifty-something self is pulling up data from her twenty-something self, trying to figure out, “What is this? What’s happening? Is this a guy who I’ve gone out on a date with a few times and he’s going to be the father of my children? No, he’s not going to be the father of my children.”
It doesn’t follow any of those old pathways, so what is it? She’s observing how she feels and sometimes feeling, yes, obsessed and then sometimes feeling like, “Well, it’s not like I think he’s so great.” She’s finding another story under which this experience is going to fall and then she will decide what it means for her.
Rumpus: Was it challenging to write the sex scenes?
Mockett: No, they came first. I don’t know why. Someone once said that I wasn’t capable of it, and that really pissed me off, so I thought, “One day I’m going to write a book that has lots of sex in it.” Actually, it was at AWP—I think I wasn’t allowed to be on a panel, so I thought, “Okay, I’m going to write a lot of sex.” I think one of the reasons why it wasn’t hard is because she’s having a pretty good time during the sex scenes. I had a couple of ideas in my head, like I wasn’t going to use any words like manhood, or I wasn’t going to do any bad poetry.
I was reading the scene where the hawks are having sex—the one hawk has killed a bird and it’s feeding his partner this dead bird, and they’re having sex while she’s eating a dead bird. I think I did say that she received him because their tails were flapping back and forth, and I read it and I thought, “Oh, dear, I said ‘received,’” because I wasn’t going to do any lame poetry sex. I was going to write what happens and how it feels and try to think of some analogies so the reader can feel some of how the character feels. The sex was some of the first stuff that came to me.
Rumpus: I don’t want to say just very straightforward, but the descriptions are very realistic, and the sex isn’t played for laughs.
Mockett: Yes. It’s not nudge-nudge wink-wink, it’s not “manhood” or “her softness” or whatever, none of that. It’s a little bit procedural, and it’s supposed to be what actually happens when people have sex. She enjoys it, so it’s not violent. Nothing terrible happens to her, and the sex scenes also are supposed to increase in intensity because she has sex once and is like, “Well, I’d like to do that again.” So, the reader hopefully gets a little bit more because that’s what happens to her. Then she hits a point, which is complex and not just about the sex, where she makes some decisions about what she wants to do about her situation.
Rumpus: Moving onto an actual tree, there’s a cherry tree in the narrator’s yard that she calls Einstein. During the course of the book, she learns that this tree was not planted there by her mother but was a volunteer. Why is that tree’s existence and the fact that it, in a way, chose to live in their yard important for the book?
Mockett: I think partly because I want people to feel that the unexpected is always happening around us and that’s true at the level of nature. I’ve read all of these anecdotes about the history of the flowering cherry tree in Japan, and I would read about some tree that is now cultivated, that it originated, and nobody knows where it came from—it just appeared in somebody’s garden and it had these properties and then everybody got excited and grafted it and turned it into this tree that’s been spread all around Japan.
I would read this, and I think even in, if I remember correctly, the Huntington Gardens, the botanical gardens in Southern California, there’s also a tree that just appeared and no one knows where it came from. This is something that happens and nobody knows how or why it happens. Trees do this. They’re probably slowly over years cross-pollinating and then there are failed trees, etcetera, but then suddenly a tree can take root. At the level of nature, I feel like that’s important for us to know.
We certainly, I think, are conscious of the ways in which humans are affecting the environment and destroying it, but there’s also something that nature is doing and reacting and responding that’s unexpected—it is the unexpected that can change the trajectory of history. I wanted to introduce that element into the story. Sometimes when we feel anger that the world isn’t going the way that we want it to, I also wanted to say that it’s true, but there’s also probably something happening that you can’t see.
A lot of what we cover in the news and a lot of the way that news stories unfold, of course, are descriptions of human action and people warning about events that are going to have larger implications down the road, but there’s also something happening that’s unseen. That can be terrible, like the COVID virus, and it can also be something miraculous and beautiful, like this tree. That’s further complicated because of what happens at the end of the book, which I won’t reveal here because it’s a bit of a spoiler. There is something real and valid about taking the time—which the narrator does all the way through the book—taking the time to stop and observe the environment and appreciate it.
The other point is that humans are also a piece of the environment, so there are things that are happening to humans, too, like the COVID virus, which I call “the sickness” in the book, but there may be things which are happening which are also not terrible. I gently wanted to make that point too. She has this benefit of a thousand years of Japanese literary history, and I didn’t want to lean into that point too heavily but rather gently. That’s one of the reasons again why The Tale of Genji appears in the book. There are these ages throughout Japanese history where they have a golden age and then it ends.
“The sickness” has hit the country and people are dying. There’s chaos and upheaval, and we who are alive today know that that’s continued, but that it isn’t an invalid way to live. This is not to say that people shouldn’t try to cooperate and try to work together toward change and try to prevent wars, disease, etcetera. I think that’s all important, but there’s something internal that can happen for people to help them weather these periods of change where maybe they’re not resigned, where they can understand that they are a part of these forces.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the novel and what was your process like?
Mockett: My previous book, American Harvest, came out in April of 2020, during the early height of the pandemic—I went to Winter Institute I think at the end of January, recorded the audiobook in February, and was watching the news thinking, “Oh, shit, this is going to be the real thing.” I felt like I understood what it could be because when I—as the narrator does in The Tree Doctor—would go to Japan with my mom, we’d go visit temples that would have been erected because of the plague. When COVID started popping up, I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be like that.” I thought, “Oh, this is serious.”
It was emotionally difficult for me because I was very excited to publish my previous book, and we all know a lot of people’s plans were disrupted . . . mine were too.
I was in Carmel with my son, and I went to the Gardening Center probably at the end of April or early May and saw all these women buying plants and talking to a man who was helping them and thought, “Oh, this would be an interesting time for one of them to have an affair with him.” Then probably at the start of May, I would have to check my notes, I wrote to my friend Al Heathcock, who had just done a virtual event with me. It had been scheduled to be in person but of course got turned into a virtual event. I called Al and said, “I have this idea for a book.” He said, “Why don’t you just write it?” I said, “Well, I’m going to make it really short and keep it in one location. Nothing that involves research, nothing that involves travel, and a tiny cast of characters.” He said, “Yes, that’s good.” I would report to him how I was doing.
The first draft, my husband said to me, I probably finished in four months. I do know that. Then I had a couple of writer friends read the draft, and I submitted it at the end of December. That was the end of—what was that? 2020 was the first draft. I sent it to my agent and then had to wait for feedback. Then did some more revisions in early 2021, and then Graywolf took it. Then it took a while for it to go through the production cycle.
It was fairly rapid, partly because I said I’m going to make it small. The previous book I wrote was really long and required a road trip, and I had to learn a lot about Christians and Christianity and spend a lot of time thinking about a new world. That was very much about exploration. This one was small and within a framework that I knew and understood. I just had to think about things I knew and already understood and was able to create fiction out of it.
A long time ago, Colson Whitehead said to me, “As soon as a new book is coming out, write another one.” I have tried and mostly failed to do that. This time I succeeded. It did help keep the depression of not being able to promote the previous book a little bit at bay.
I like to say to my friends that obsession is the secret ingredient to being a creative person and I thought if I could just make myself obsessed over this novel, then I won’t think so much about the things I’m not doing for the other book.
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Author photograph by Alfie Goodrich
