The View From Breast Pocket Mountain by Karen Hill Anton

The View From Breast Pocket Mountain by Karen Hill Anton

Memoir Book Awards GRAND PRIZE (2022)

Winner SPR Book Awards GOLD PRIZE (2020)

Book Readers Appreciation Group Medallion (2021)

Crossing borders, cultures, creating home

The View from Breast Pocket Mountain is a unique and previously untold story, a treasure trove of experiences crossing borders and cultures, creating a life, and finding contentment in a far-off country.

As a motherless teenager raised by a caring albeit strict father, we see Anton's developing awareness of the world beyond the boundaries of her New York City neighborhood before she goes on to live in a castle in 1960s Denmark and a cabin in 1970s Vermont. With a burning curiosity and vision of a life as yet unformed, she travels overland to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and finally to the place she'll come to call home, Japan.

This memoir is filled with unexpected encounters with the very famous and those unknown and unnamed. On a journey through marriage and motherhood, love, laughter, tragedy and hope, we follow along as Anton makes her way through a life unplanned but well lived. The View from Breast Pocket Mountain is a story for our time, reminding the reader of our interconnectedness, our shared humanity.

Karen Hill Anton, formerly a columnist for The Japan Times and the Japanese newspaper Chunichi Shimbun, is a cross-cultural competence consultant and coach. She lectures widely on her experience of cross-cultural adaptation and raising four bilingual, bicultural children. Originally from New York City, she's achieved second-degree mastery in Japanese calligraphy and has lived with her husband William Anton in rural Japan since 1975.