Book Review: A Rising Sun on the Scallop Shell
A Rising Sun on the Scallop Shell: Dual Identity on the Camino de Santiago
Mike Guest
Independently published, 2025
316 pages (paperback and Kindle editions)
Reviewed by Jerald Stroebele | Anchorage, AK
Here is another recent memoir written by a first-time Camino walker who thinks he has a good story for both first-time and veteran Camino pilgrims. He does, offering a story from his own perspective as a West Coast Canadian who has lived in Japan for more than 30 years with his traditional Japanese family. In his words, Japan is a large chunk of his identity. He was an associate professor teaching English skills at a medical university and traveled widely in East and Southeast Asia. His writing proves his skills. Although the book is self-published, it is practically flawless.
The author’s cozy academic and modern Japanese life was upended by his mother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease and his sister’s subsequent diagnosis of the same. His Japanese father-in-law died within days of his own mother. His enjoyable face-to-face relationships with his students was replaced by remote teaching required by the COVID-19 pandemic. Needing a life reset, he quit his job and walked the Camino Francés in 2023. On his backpack he carried a concha shell from a Japanese beach that featured the Hinomaru (rising sun) flag instead of the red Templar cross. His intent was to engage his fellow pilgrims. He did.
In the author’s words “. . . the narrative is aimed at those who take an interest in intersecting cultural identities, modern Japan, and the experience of the pilgrimage itself.” There is a lot of dialogue in the book. It is somewhat an auctor-lector writing style where one asks a question and another answers. Intriguing, informative, and good.
I am not sure how a Japanese reader would react to the author’s forthrightness. He has not yet translated it into Japanese. He also discusses the large number of Catholic and Christian Korean pilgrims on the Caminos. I recommend it to Japanese and Korean pilgrims and to any pilgrim planning to walk the Eighty-eight Temple circuit and the Kumano Kodo pilgrimages in Japan or the Beautiful Pilgrim Route of Jeonju, a six-faith pilgrimage in Korea. It is a good guide to respecting others’ cultures and to the Camino Francés.
This book lured me to read it because I lived in Japan for three years as an early teen and became enamored with and respectful of Japanese culture. My daughter and son-in-law walked the Korean Jeonju pilgrimage. I walked the Camino Francés at the same time as the author. Too bad I did not meet him. But the book nicely shares him with me.
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