Rebecca Suzuki’s prose and poetry live the multilingual, multinational life 

The profound and the mundane intertwine in Rebecca Suzuki’s collection of prose and other poetic forms in When My Mother is Most Beautiful.

The collection opens with “Moukohan,” about a Mongolian spot that is a temporary blue birthmark that is “a marker of non-European descent.” She muses about what her mother was thinking when she saw it:

She muses further:

In this and other works, she braids English and Japanese (in Kanji ideograms and a pronunciation-based romanization system). Initially, the braiding reads as an affectation, but as the collection proceeds, these footnoted poems evoke a particular way of thinking, an identity, complexity, and multiple cultures. The uses of the two languages are about staving off cultural loss. These themes are especially resonant in “when I didn’t know how to say my own name anymore” (about a run-in with a librarian) and “on listening to your brain” and “I am Phantasmagoric.”

“樱” (or sakura, the Japanese word for “cherry blossom) brings up what reads like a sore point.  When Suzuki was born, her mother wanted to name her Cherry Blossom, a symbol of beauty and culture. However, her aunt argued against that, disliking that the cherry blossom “withers and dies in just a week.” The poet sees the varying stances as reflections of differing personalities.  Both her mother and aunt had their points, based on the poem, “Other Side.”

She writes: “There is a third side to this story:  by the time it came to choosing a name for me, their mother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.”

Several works deal with how the living interact with the dead. “Spirits are other beings, they are not you,” describes the four-day mourning / remembrance period of Obon, the Japanese festival of the dead held in mid-August. Part of the celebrations and ceremonies involve cooking food to offer the ancestral spirits. On the last day…

There is one rule when we send our ancestors back: whatever you do, do not look back. The whole way home, we must keep looking straight ahead and never turn back to look at the beach. This is so that our ancestors don’t see our faces and become tempted to follow us back home instead of going back to 天国. (tengoku or “heaven” or “afterlife”)

The cover of this chapbook shows an eggplant poked through with disposable chopsticks.

In “she’s being dramatic as usual,” the practice of releasing an eggplant horse into the ocean is mentioned again. It is unclear if the poet participates in traditional rites out of belief or going through the motions, given that there is not a clear coherent rationale. In a later poem in the collection, “eggplant,” the poet is notified that the ancient practice of sending eggplants with chopsticks to sea is no longer part of mourning practice. There is a risk of polluting the ocean, with an individual quipping: “Imagine a turtle with chopsticks in its nose!” The times are changing, but there are always the dead to venerate, in different ways.

The poet’s mother is a main focus of this collection. “樱 as Mother” has her mother preparing for a middle school reunion in Japan, with schoolmates that she has not seen in over four decades. Her mother needs to update her phone. She puts in a new background photo on her new device that resonates with beauty and meaning. “Permanent Non-Erasable Trail” describes her mother’s habit to greet a new year, by taking out a paintbrush and ink stick and making some permanent marks perhaps as a symbol of leaving something meaningful behind in the next year. In “A Scene from a Play Called Sunset at Shinmaiko,” there is a remembrance of their mother using a videotape to say goodbye to an old century and to the new.  “a mother’s beauty” surrounds the Gingko tree and the peculiarities of its reproduction and also how people consume the nut of the tree.

Her deep love for her mother does not mean she is exempt from being laughed at, however, such as in “The Three of Us Still Talk About This Moment and It’s Still Funny.”

“before before before” imagines her beloved mother in her youth when she made a brief foray into horseback riding.  She reverts in time:

Such an approach is rare, not just thinking of a person in terms of what she meant to her but as her own person and independent of the child. The imagination required to think of how life could have been otherwise is refreshing.

That ability to engage complexity is addressed in “The privilege of maybe” and “infinite number of possibilities” (which builds off of chaos theory).  She writes:

In “neck support,” her mother is her safe place and her total comfort and her total memory:   “My mother is the only person who knows how I’ve been all my life.”  The title poem, “when my mother is most beautiful,” lauds her mother playing with her before school, by pretending droplets of water on a large leaf are tadpoles.

This collection does not only laud her mother’s playfulness and love. In a poem titled “

“貧乏ゆすり”(or “poverty extortion”), the author alludes to growing up poor in her mother-led household. There is a concept that the poor shake their legs out of nervousness:

“early days” remembers arriving as a young mother-led family to New York and an adventure at a local pizzeria, just the poet, her mother, and her sister.

The poet had lost her father young to what reads as an accident (in the touching “in one version of this poem we swim toward life”). In “A gift from my father,” he leaves her with her name, something of his Jewish identity and heritage. She recalls a flavor of “mitarashi dango,” which she cannot find again, in  “in this poem my father buys me みたらし団子.”

Friends are important, but they are not blood. In “a haibun about fleeting friendships,” this poet laments a bff from sixth grade who has gone on with her life and essentially ghosted her.  In “remember that we are plants,” one friend comforts her by suggesting that people are plans, and another counters with the idea that people cannot conduct photosynthesis though. Regardless, the pull of nature is ever-present, in “longing for trees,” “floating,” and  “We followed you, sun,” both of which deal with the experience of emigration.

For all the fanciful verses, the poet shows a savvy sense of what is possible and what is not, such as in “whose wish is it anyway?” Various works engage issues of identity, American racism, violence, and other challenges in the time of the pandemic. When her mother goes through the citizenship ceremony, she asks if she should change her name (“名前を変えないで”). At the beginning of the pandemic, given the widespread attacks on Asians, Suzuki notes: “My mother stopped taking the subway in 2020.” There is an “ally” poem related to Native Americans in, “Do You Like Horses.”

When My Mother is Most Beautiful, as a collection, reads as down-to-earth. It is in the simple moments that profound observations are made. These works celebrate nature and weather, ancestors of the spirit world, family, aesthetics, and languages.

In “My Mother’s Language,” Rebecca Suzuki writes of the struggle to maintain cultures and mindsets and languages:

The works are approachable and skillfully woven.