“For me the only way I can have a relationship with divinity is through the unknown, through mystery. If your idea of divinity is leaning into the mystery, you’re more likely to find grace in a variety of places. In my fiction I have tried to make traditionally ugly places beautiful and filled with grace—garbage dumps, malls. I’ve always had that impulse to try to see things not the way the world sees them, but to see the spark of movement and divinity in what is considered to be darkness, ugliness. That makes the most spiritual sense to me.”

Recently at the ancient Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto, monks gathered to introduce a new version of an old deity: Mindar, an android embodying Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. Standing over six feet tall, most of her body the aluminum skeleton of a robot, bolts and rivets all on view, Mindar is honest about her…