Must Read: Dog Man, a Story About Akitas

I just finished reading a book called Dog Man by journalist Martha Sherrill. It's a simple biography of a man named Morie who spends his life in the mountains breeding Akitas. It was one of the best stories about Japan that I've read in a long, long time.

Sherrill follows the lives of Morie and Kitako Sawataishi from the moment they met in wartime Tokyo to their present day life as elderly mountain dwellers. While it has a seemingly simple plot on surface level, it's one of those books where, when you're done reading, you think, wow. This book works on so many levels. There isn't a single fluffy adjective or expression of emotion anywhere, and it's written with the snappiness of good magazine journalism—yet you'll find yourself close to tears at the end of several chapters. Morie, the husband, is a super Asian patriarch who makes decisions without consulting his wife and hardly shows any emotions. But he has one gigantic soft spot that he dedicates his life too, and that's the Akitas.

During WW2, it was considered wasteful to spend money feeding dogs or to keep them alive when you could skin them for warm coats. Morie, a mountain man who believed that the spirit of these mountain dogs had to be preserved somehow, kept one in a secret shed, sought out others, and became one of Japan's greatest Akita breeders. He was never swayed by trends and he never sold a single puppy. He now has a lot of descendants, from his now-elderly daughter who now lives with him to a son who works at Bumble and bumble in NY. The entire way through, you keep hoping that Morie will give Kitako, his patient city-girl-at-heart wife, to go back to Tokyo and live the life she's always dreamed of.

Anyway, it's a super easy, good read. I highly recommend it to those of you who need a break from getting your Japan fix through Haruki Murakami or the recent influx of books written by Americans that attempt to explain Japanese culture presumptuously analyze social phenomena.

Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain by Martha Sherrill = 5/5 stars

Comments

[Kris]

Sounds interesting; thank you, I'll have to pick that one up.

I'm wondering - have you ever read 'Confessions of a Yakuza' by Junichi Saga? I read it a couple years ago and enjoyed it very much. Definitely recommend it.