Good Could Have Been Great

My Year of Dirt and Water: Journal of a Zen Monk’s Wife in Japan by Tracy Franz.  Stone Bridge Press.  306 pp. $16.95.  ***1/2

I don’t believe in publishing pages from a journal.  I’m all for keeping a journal (Thoreau is one of my heroes); it’s an invaluable practice to sit down every day and review your experience one way or another.   But it’s also helpful to step back from what happened after a passage of time, and put it in perspective.  When it came time to publish, Thoreau transformed his material into something new (famously cramming two years into one when he composed Walden).  It’s thrilling to find one of the great sentences of Walden scrawled in a daily journal, but I don’t think Thoreau would have published the journal himself.  He believed in composing a book.

I feel that way even when—as in the case of Anais Nin—she was obviously composing her “diaries” to be published, especially the later ones.  There are rumors that she extensively rewrote them, perhaps even changed details.  That’s a diary?

Still, I found it thrilling to read about the famous people who surrounded her, especially Henry Miller.  Her prose I wasn’t wild about.

All that having been said, I was riveted to the pages of My Year of Dirt and Water, Tracy Franz’s journals of the year in Japan when her husband was training in a Zen monastery and she was mostly on her own, teaching, learning to throw pots, attending karate class, and practicing Zen as a lay person, with the group that she and her husband started.  I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese culture, and Tracy Franz is an excellent writer, with plenty of insight into her own life and the culture that surrounded her.  Her husband, I might add, has one of the best websites on Zen, Nyoho Zen, and is also an editor at Buddhadharma magazine.  He began his training in March of 2004.  The journal runs for one year, though Tracy doesn’t include entries from every day.

Koun Franz describes this book on his website as a “rare and honest account of lay practice,” and I was disappointed in that regard.  Tracy sat once a week with her Zen group, except when it seemed to fizzle out for a while, also seemed to sit on other occasions, but there is no account of a daily practice, and she didn’t talk much about practice in general.  She talked more about throwing pots—which sounds difficult—than sitting zazen.

More problematic is the fact that the journal format enabled her to avoid talking about matters that are at the heart of her story.  Her mother is an artist who went through three husbands that we know of, and in the year 2004 is living in Alaska and dating a man named—at least according to this account—Thor.  (Franz admits to changing some names.  I’m wondering.)  Tracy’s mother seems to have picked another winner, an artist who is self-absorbed and impressed with himself, often neglectful of her.  She seems like a bright and interesting person, but a bit of a space cadet, not terribly good at choosing men.  Tracy hints that to some extent she followed in her mother’s footsteps, but when she found Koun (whose name at that time was Garrett) she knew she had a keeper, followed him to Japan before their relationship as lovers was established.

Even more troubling is the fact that her mother’s third husband was apparently abusive in ways that deeply scarred Tracy and were difficult to get over.  She mentions this fact in diary entries, alludes to it in conversations with her mother, but if she had written a memoir she would have been forced to go into more detail.  My impression is that Tracy resents her mother for being a space cadet, for flitting from man to man, and especially for marrying this third husband, and not protecting her daughter better.  The women get along in the present moment, but don’t seem close.

It’s good they get along, because Tracy not only visits her at an academic break, but her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer later in the year, so Tracy goes back again.  She would really like to leave her life in Anchorage behind, but she keeps having to go back (the perpetual dilemma of young people as their parents age).  Apparently that trend continued.  Koun had a zendo in Anchorage from 2006 to 2010.

I’m convinced there is a fascinating story here, but it never quite gets told, because the journal format allows Franz to dodge it.  I wish she had written the memoir that seems to be lurking between the lines of these pages.  That might have been a fascinating book.