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“… a deeply personal story that spans decades and continents and explores the nature of self, of memory, of love, and most importantly of truth.”

— Richard Cox, House of the Rising Sun

What People Are Saying

 

“Gritty investigative reportage becomes page-turning fiction in Don Mitchell’s capable hands. Based on a real life and long unsolved killing that the author himself was for a time considered a suspect in, Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton’s Murder is a breathless, globe-spanning mystery that also doubles as both a love story and a fascinating anthropological investigation into the human heart and mind. Fans of everyone from James Ellroy to Bill Bryson should race out to get themselves a copy of this terrific book.”

— Sean Beaudoin, 'Welcome thieves’

“Don Mitchell’s Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton's Murder starts off as a murder mystery, with a novel twist: the narrator is a suspect. As his story unfolds, he conveys the frustration, anger, and self-doubt that comes from being haunted for decades by the unsolved killing of a friend. And when the mystery is solved, one question remains: Why did this stay with him for all these years? Shibai takes the reader on a journey through the peripheral damage caused by years of not knowing. It is, ultimately, a story of the damage done by doubt, and the power of friendships in the face of loss.”

— Peter Turchi, ‘A Muse and a Maze’

“With hypnotic and intimate language, Mitchell shares a deeply personal story that spans decades and continents and explores the nature of self, of memory, of love, and most importantly of truth. In an age where reality itself is under attack, Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton’s Murder reminds us that while facts are never subjective, the way we react to them can alter the course of our lives forever.”

— Richard Cox, ‘House of the Rising Sun’

“Really remarkable ... a privilege to read. One, because it feels very intimate and honest and, two, because it is such a finely told story and, three, I love the many layers of thinking that are revealed: the 'how to tell a story' and embedded demonstrations of such, the wrestling with what is real and what’s shibai, what is others trying to understand your thinking, and what kind of thinking they want to lead you onto, and what everyone’s motivation is for doing what they do, saying what they say.”

— Ginia Loo, Ph.D., Punahou School (Honolulu)

 

Don texts with Peter Sennott, the Massachussets State Police detective who finally got put on the case and saw it through.

“In the early morning of January 7, 1969, Jane Britton, a gifted Harvard graduate student in archaeology, was murdered in her Cambridge apartment. Don Mitchell, a close friend who lived in the neighboring apartment, never heard a thing but found her body the next day. On one level, the book recounts Mitchell’s compelling and brutally honest odyssey in dealing with this traumatic event for half a century until the murder was finally solved in November 2018. But on a deeper level Mitchell forces the reader to grapple with the passage of time, the nature of truth, indeed with life and death itself. And he takes us on a captivating cross cultural journey, moving from the remote Pacific island of Bougainville to the dramatic Mauna Kea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island to the bowels of the Cambridge police station. Mitchell’s life took turns he never expected and he weaves a fascinating tale in seeking to make sense of it all.”

— Michael Widmer, Journalist and former President of Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation

 

“Fans of everyone from James Ellroy to Bill Bryson should race out to get themselves a copy of this terrific book.”

“For fifty years, Don Mitchell lived with the memory of finding his friend and fellow anthropology classmate, Jane Britton, murdered in her apartment. Questioned then about his potential involvement, Mitchell struggled for decades with a lack of answers about her death. In his book, he explores how memory and meaning shapeshift, the way facts can shatter long-held perceptions about one’s self and others, and how love and connection transcend time and culture. Mitchell’s bare, poignant memoir about his life as an anthropologist, writer, and photographer circles again and again back to Jane and ends with a shocking resolution no one expected.”

— Ronlyn Domingue, ‘The Mercy of Thin Air’ and ‘Keeper of Tales’ Trilogy

 
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“In this compelling hybrid memoir and true-crime account, Mitchell recounts how the cold-case murder of his friend Jane Britton, a fellow graduate student in the Harvard anthropology department, was solved after 49 years. Shibai, a Japanese word for a stage play, also means “gaslighting” or “bullshit” in the slang of Mitchell’s native Hawai’i. As an anthropologist among the Nagovisi people of Bougainville, Mitchell learned early that truth is always filtered through the stories we tell ourselves and the roles in which our culture casts us. When Becky Cooper, a journalist for The New Yorker, contacts him for a book she is writing about Jane’s case, he discovers, in retelling the story to a stranger, that his long-held assumptions about the murder don’t hold up. With him, the reader relives the Kafka-esque terror of being suspected by the police, the frustration when the investigation is stonewalled or misled by people he once loved, and the sorrow and relief of finally filling in the gaps about Jane’s last moments. The resulting saga is a profound and subtle meditation on memory, aging, and our responsibility to the dead. Like a shadow that provides contrast in a photograph, Jane’s unlived life stands as a counterpart to Mitchell’s honest and self-aware journey through the milestones of his 70-plus years, from the triumphs and disappointments of his academic career to his deep relationship with the Hawaiian landscape and people.”

— Jendi Reiter, ‘Two Natures’

“A whirlpool of stories circle the center - a riveting cold case that happened in 1969. Honest and introspective, Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton’s Murder recounts the case and, through it, explores the protagonist’s incredulity surrounding a woman-friend’s death. A mystery within a mystery, the story is written in the second person, the years of living with this unsolved death deftly handled, in trying to make sense of what had happened and who the murderer could be. Rather than being a hindrance or a vehicle of accusation, the you becomes a road of self-exploration, attendant to varying aspects of the murder, the shibai found in it, and in the writer’s life itself. The honesty is disarming at times, sad and heart-rending in others, the ‘you’ a way to look at life’s triumphs and failures, as well as a way to examine the murder and the protagonist’s role. Even after sixty-four or so years, with incarceration still possible, and the many aspects of innocence or guilt by association, the shibai of friends and enemies, how the nuance of language is shaded in the interplay of peoples’ guesses about what had happened, and finally, who the murderer had really been all along are all parts of this wonderful and unusual book. Read it!”

— Juliet Kono Lee, ‘aNSHU: Dark Sorrow’

Goodreads / AMAZON

  • I read Don Mitchell's nonfiction book, Shibai, in two sessions, finishing this morning during three uninterrupted hours in which I was totally absorbed. This is a book, a memoir, worth reading, thinking about and discussing for many reasons. Let me say this: I am not a reader of mysteries, except perhaps Jostein Gaarder's "Sophie's World" which is not generally considered a mystery — and I'm not a fan of thrillers or true crime (with the exception of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood"). I generally don't like "page-turners" because all too often they are contrived to show how clever the author is. I don't read to be scared or titillated, I don't like to be played. I read to connect, to feel, to understand, to explore. Yet I was compelled to turn the pages of this Mitchell's unusual psychological memoir, totally absorbed. This reflection, this confession, this memoir, relates to me, to all of us: how we assume things, how our own memories mislead us, lie to us, shibai us, if I can make a verb of the Japanese noun the author so appropriately chooses for the title. "Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton's Murder" is an anthropologist's absorbing exploration of his own life — and the lifelong impact of one young woman's death. Do we want to find out who done it? Yes, but that's not what kept me riveted. I am left with many questions to ponder, including this one: Who do the dead belong to?

  • As a writing teacher, I will reach for Don Mitchell’s “Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton's Murder” as an example of the brilliant use of the second person. Mitchell’s “you” address is intimate, disarming, and bold. As a writer and a human being, I continue to be moved by the pacing of the story and the spare prose Mitchell employs to deftly span a fifty year timeline in the service of solving a murder and excavating the toll of being a friend, a witness, and a suspect. Ultimately, Mitchell reveals the wages of gaps in information and the weight of sorrow and confusion’s accretion over the years: the mental, emotional, and psychological cost of the things we tell ourselves about ourselves and others when we try to make sense of love, violence, and loss — and here, acutely, the abject anguish of the unsolved murder. He takes us inside the reckoning that occurs when forced to face errors in assumption — long-trusted intuitions — about the people in his orbit, about the friend that he lost, and about himself once the final facts are bared.

  • What an amazing book that I will be thinking about and reflect on for years to come. In this work, which spans most of the authors' life, we are privileged to join him on a transparent and very honest journey about his life in relation to others. Certainly, the central theme is the mystery of Jane Britton's death and the evolution of solving the crime, but for me, it was so much more. Throughout the book is the conversation of what is real, and what is Shibai (a term used in Hawaii for lies or B.S.), what has been "spun" to align with the author's perception of the world. This conversation was so forthright, so plainspoken, that I could not help but start asking questions about my own life, my own Shibai, and for that, I am grateful.

  • Got this as a gift from a friend and was a bit unsure about it — but once I started reading, I was hooked, and finished it in short order and passed it along to my spouse. We both liked it a lot. Even though it's very personal and confessional, it's not maudlin or self-involved — deeply reflective, but not in an egocentric, navel-gazing way. The style is distinctive and creates a captivating synthesis of the author's inner monologue with external events, mundane and exceptional. The story is intriguing, too! But I came away feeling as if I had lost track of time looking into a miniature painting with perfectly rendered details on every inch. A work of art.

  • Don's book is a dizzying descent into the vagrancies of memory, the weight of loss and fear, and the mercilessness of the unknown. For most of his life, the author has carried the shadow of a young murdered woman, a friend and Harvard colleague, who was brutally raped and murdered. The circle of this woman's acquaintances tacitly consider the murderer to be someone among them, the author himself accused of murder by friends. The murder is never solved. Almost a half-century later the murder investigation is revived, spurred by a young writer, Becky Cooper, who becomes friends with Don as she writes her book and Don writes his book. What becomes especially poignant in Shibai, is the use of the 2nd person as Don relives the murder and subsequent years through memory, written record, and the current investigation, which triggers within Don old fears and guilt. Don puzzles through the gaps of memory as we are given the riveting opportunity to hear the story from the side of a suspect, past and, as Don fears, current.

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