KODO NISHIMURA INTRODUCES himself as a Buddhist monk, a makeup artist, and a member of the LGBTQ+ community—but defining a self is not so simple as that. When someone asks Nishimura if he’s gay, transgender, or queer, he feels stuck for an answer, and doesn’t doubt that many others are similarly frustrated. “We should know,” Nishimura writes, “that our own awareness of being is what makes us us.”
Much of the profundity of Nishimura’s book (Watkins) arises out of his training in Jodo Shu, a branch of Pureland Buddhism founded in twelfth-century Japan. Nishimura brilliantly intersperses personal memoir with gentle writing exercises for exploring one’s heart alongside excerpted sutras that support Nishimura’s seemingly untraditional path. Nishimura
