She is pictured here with a poster of the Japanese boy band, Arashi, in Kyoto, Japan. Gordon Drummond Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of Picking Bones from Ash. I'm an adult now, but my adolescent me still cheers for Tsukushi. I too, cowered from bullies and skipped lunch altogether to avoid having to figure out where to sit, while I longed for acceptance and escape. Why? I too, attended an elite prep school in northern California with a trenchant cliquey system of which teachers were sometimes a part. In the summer of 2007, I spent a great deal of time absorbing Hana Yori Dango. Into this fray steps young Tsukushi, a scholarship student. It's a signal that the student will now be subject to mandatory ostracism and torture, while the cliquey F4, scions of Japan's wealthiest families, will sit back and watch. The story begins at Eitoku Academy, where the students have a novel approach to bullying: Every few weeks an unsuspecting student opens his locker, sees a flag hanging inside and hyperventilates. Trust me, it makes more sense in Japanese than English.
She's the main character of Yoko Kamio's wildly successful manga series, Hana Yori Dango, which loosely translates to Boys Over Flowers, a pun that refers to people's preference for dango, or sweet rice dumplings, over flowers during a cherry blossom viewing picnic. Tsukushi also happens to be the name of my very favorite Japanese heroine. On a given weekend, you may see women and a few men carefully poring over the warming earth, foraging for fuki no to (coltsfoot), warabi (ferns) and my favorite, tsukushi (horsetail shoot). Many of these weeds are sansai: mountain vegetables prized for their delicate flavor and sold in farmer's markets. In the mountains, wild vegetables are beginning to push through the snow.
News reports on the nuclear disaster, and havoc and destruction wrought by the earthquake and tsunami are intertwined with progress reports on the wave of cherry blossoms sweeping across the nation.
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