Celebrating the Humbling Privilege of Awareness

By: Kaori Mizuki
Print – 978-1-998478-31-6
EBook- 978-1-998478-33-0
192 pages 5.25″ X 8”
In a world racing toward artificial perfection, Kaori Mizuki reminds us that wisdom lives first in our messy, imperfect bodies. Through essays that move between her fish market stall in Kamakura and her winter home in Puerto Vallarta, Mizuki finds profound truth in unlikely places – fish guts and menstrual blood, aging joints and morning mucus, the particular angle of a dying fish’s eye.
With unflinching attention to physical reality and razor-sharp philosophical insight, these essays explore how spiritual truth flows not despite but through our complete human experience. From watching a praying mantis navigate market crowds to observing how elderly couples maintain intimacy, Mizuki reveals how our deepest wisdom often speaks through our most overlooked moments.
Part meditation on mortality, part celebration of embodied consciousness, this collection invites readers to rediscover the sacred in the seemingly mundane. Through Mizuki’s eyes, even cleaning fish becomes an act of communion with life’s greatest mysteries.
These essays, accompanied by striking monochrome illustrations, offer a revolutionary perspective: that heaven isn’t found by transcending our human experience, but by diving deeper into it.
“Mizuki writes with the precision of a surgeon and the soul of a poet. Her essays remind us that wisdom lives not in perfect moments but in embracing our complete human experience – mess, mortality, and all.”
– Sarah Zhang
“In an age obsessed with sanitizing human experience, Mizuki’s unflinching attention to physical reality feels like a revelation. These essays transform the mundane into the sacred without ever losing their grip on authentic human experience.”
– Dr. James Liu
“Reading Mizuki is like having a deeply wise friend who isn’t afraid to talk about the things most spiritual writers politely ignore. Her essays find profound truth in unlikely places, teaching us how to reconcile our physical and spiritual natures.”
– Maria Rodriguez
“A masterwork of embodied spirituality. Mizuki shows us that transcendence doesn’t mean escaping our human experience but fully inhabiting it. Her essays transform how we think about the relationship between body and soul.”
– David Chen
Sample Stories
Ten Pesos to Paradise
The bus arrives like a sigh of heated metal, its diesel breath mixing with the afternoon air. For ten pesos, I buy passage into one of humanity’s most intricate dances – the choreography of bodies navigating shared space. The door wheezes open, releasing a blast of warmth that carries the complex poetry of human presence.
A young man rises as I enter, gesturing to his seat with that particular mix of diffidence and dignity that marks emerging adulthood. I feel the familiar hesitation – that moment of knowing my refusal, though polite, might discourage future gallantry. His offering creates an obligation not just to him, but to all the young men who will come after, who are watching and learning how to be in the world. The exchange of seat for blessing is witnessed by the entire bus, a silent approval that makes him both proud and shy.
Through his rear-view mirror, the driver watches this interaction with professional interest. I see his slight nod – the Japanese woman treated like any other abuela, the social contract maintained. My acceptance of the seat completes a circle of grace that started before any of us were born.
The air is thick with stories told in scent – not the expected symphony of sweat, but rather a complex composition of lives in motion. The sharp note of diesel provides the base, while above it rise the sweet artificiality of AXE body spray (that particular variety favored by boys newly conscious of their bodies), the warm flour-and-corn perfume of fresh tortillas cradled in someone’s shopping bag, and the subtle chemistry of makeup warming on skin. A woman’s jasmine perfume mingles with the pungent masculinity of someone’s aftershave, creating an unintended duet.
Bodies perform their intricate ballet of adjustment – torsos turning sideways to allow passage, shoulders softening to create space, heads tilting to avoid unwanted intimacy. A pregnant woman boards, and seats materialize as if by magic. The collective body of passengers moves like a single organism, guided by unwritten rules of respect and necessity.
Men navigate the delicate geography of proximity – not too close to women (which would be threatening), not too close to other men (which would trigger ancient anxieties about masculinity). Each slight shift of weight, each repositioning of hands on the overhead rail, carries meaning in this silent language of shared space.
A child stands on a seat to look out the window, her mother’s hand instinctively steadying her without interrupting conversation. An elderly man protects his bag of pan dulce with the careful attention of one carrying treasure. A teenager pretends to sleep, his earbuds carrying him to a private universe, yet his body automatically sways to accommodate the bus’s motion and his neighbors’ needs.
Here, in this moving metal box, I witness the true measure of civilization – not in grand monuments or written laws, but in the thousand small courtesies that make collective life possible. The way a tall man ducks so others can see the street signs through the window. How a woman shifts her shopping bags to make room for another’s feet. The practiced choreography of strangers sharing intimate space while maintaining necessary boundaries.
A gecko clings to the outside of the window, somehow keeping pace, its head tilted as if studying this peculiar human ceremony. Perhaps it too recognizes that here, in these unspoken negotiations of space and respect, lies the true heart of human society. Each micro-adjustment, each silent accommodation, forms part of an ancient dance that keeps us human, keeps us whole.
ten pesos buy grace —
strangers dance ancient patterns
through shared metal space
(what buses teach here:)
some wealth flows through careful moves
For ten pesos, I purchase not just transport but participation in this daily miracle – how we learn to move together, breathe together, exist together in respectful silence. The bus lumbers through narrow streets, carrying its cargo of individual lives temporarily woven into a single tapestry of shared journey. This too is sacred – this knowing how to be alone together, how to honor boundaries while dissolving them, how to speak volumes without saying a word.
The Space Between Seeing
This morning, the beggar’s hands trembled more than usual when I gave him his sandwich. The tremors had that particular quality that comes not from cold or withdrawal, but from something deeper – as if his body were trying to shake loose from reality itself. His fingernails were rimmed with black, skin weathered to leather by sun and neglect. But it was his eyes that caught me – clear for once, focused, seeking something I couldn’t name.
An hour later, he appeared at my market stall, crossing boundaries I’d never seen him cross before. The other vendors tensed – they know him as the man who talks to invisible beings, who sometimes shouts at demons only he can see. His presence here, among the fresh fish and paying customers, violated the unspoken rules that keep our commercial world turning smoothly.
He stood at that precise distance that marks the edge of social acceptance – not close enough to disturb my customers, not far enough to pretend he wasn’t there. His eyes met mine with an intelligence that made my stomach clench. No mumbling today, no desperate avoidance. Just that steady gaze that asked something I couldn’t understand, in a language I couldn’t speak.
My hands kept moving – muscle memory continuing to clean fish while my mind raced. The metallic scent of fish blood mixed with the particular sour-sweet odor of unwashed human, creating a perfume that spoke of all the ways we fail each other. Around us, customers stepped carefully away, their bodies unconsciously creating a void that marked him as other, as someone whose suffering exceeded our capacity to acknowledge.
What do you do when someone’s need is so vast it swallows all your possible responses? My extra sandwich felt suddenly pathetic – a token gesture that changed nothing, solved nothing. The tobacco I sometimes give him, which he rolls in newspaper with careful precision, seems now like permission to slowly die, not kindness at all.
Through my open stall window, I could smell rain approaching – that metallic tang that precedes storms. His clothes weren’t waterproof. His cardboard sleeping spot behind the arboles would soon be soaked. These facts sat in my stomach like lead, like the weight of all the world’s insufficient answers.
He kept standing there, eyes steady now, more present than I’d ever seen him. What was he trying to tell me? What help was he seeking that I couldn’t give? My hands moved mechanically through their familiar tasks – scaling, gutting, cleaning – while my heart thrashed like a fish in unexpected air.
Time stretched between us like a taught string. Customers came and went, money changed hands, ordinary commerce continued its dance. But he stood, watching, until something in his face changed – a light going out, a door closing. Then he turned and walked away, back straight, steps deliberate. My heart went with him, torn from my chest by the immensity of what I couldn’t do.
man stands watching
while fish blood marks passing time —
some needs have no words
(what flesh remembers:)
helplessness tastes like copper
The rest of my day moved through its familiar patterns – customers haggling over prices, fish being cleaned, ice slowly melting in the afternoon heat. But my hands kept trembling slightly, marking each task with the subtle tremor of insufficient response. What good is an extra sandwich, a bit of tobacco, when what’s needed is something far deeper – perhaps something our whole society has forgotten how to give?
Tonight, I’ll make tomorrow’s sandwich anyway. I’ll buy more tobacco, though my conscience protests this small mercy that might hasten his end. I’ll continue these token gestures because they’re all I have to offer. But my body will remember his eyes, the weight of that wordless request, the vast space between seeing someone’s pain and having the power to heal it.
The fish know something about this, I think. Each day, I watch them slowly die on ice, their eyes filming over with that particular clouding that marks the transition from life to food. We can’t save everything. We can’t heal every wound. Sometimes all we can do is witness, hold space, acknowledge the impossibility of adequate response.
But oh, how that knowledge sits like stones in the belly, like salt in fresh wounds. How it makes mockery of our spiritual pretensions, our careful philosophies, our attempts at ordered meaning. Here is a soul drowning in plain sight, and all I have to offer is bread and leaves wrapped in yesterday’s news.
Late at night, after too many hours reading psychiatric websites and medical journals, my eyes burn from the blue screen’s glare. Most of the technical language slides past my comprehension – terms like “negative symptoms” and “disorganized thinking” that try to categorize the uncategorizable. But one line catches in my throat like a fish bone: “Sometimes they experience rare and brief episodes of clarity.”
The words hit me like a physical blow, making my stomach clench with belated understanding. Those eyes that met mine today – was that one of those moments? Did he surface briefly from whatever storms rage in his mind, only to find himself still standing in a world that had long ago decided he was unreachable? Did he come looking for connection in that brief window of clarity, only to find me paralyzed by my own inadequacy?
The thought makes my hands shake so badly I have to set down my phone. To think that in his moment of reaching out, all I could do was stand there, bound by social conventions and my own uncertainty. What did he see in those clear moments? What did he want to say? By the time I saw the light fade from his eyes, was he already submerging back into his private chaos?
The rain has started now. Somewhere in the city, he seeks shelter, carries his invisible battles, lives a pain I can neither understand nor ease. My hands smell of fish and failure. Tomorrow, I’ll make another sandwich. It will not be enough. Nothing, perhaps, would be enough. This too is part of the human journey – this space between seeing and saving, between witnessing and healing, between the vastness of need and the poverty of response.
The market cats watched me close my stall, their eyes holding their own ancient wisdom about the limits of help, about how sometimes presence is all we can offer to a world so full of wounds. Perhaps they knew something I’m still learning – about how to carry the weight of insufficient response, about how to keep reaching out even when we know our reach will fall short.
Like the fish, we do what we can. Like the rain, we fall where we must. Like the cats, we witness what we cannot change. And somehow, in all of this not-enough, something holy still moves – in the trying, in the failing, in the getting up to try again tomorrow.
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