Some stories begin a generation before the narrator arrives. Michael T. Mitsui’s memoir, Against the Current, opens this way: with his parents, Japanese immigrants to Canada whose lives were shaped by the Second World War and, by the book’s own account, by the shadow of Hiroshima. The lessons that filtered down from that history, perseverance, humility, and what Mitsui describes as unconditional love, became the foundation beneath everything that followed, including a career built on the deliberate, exacting work of ballroom dance.
The book, now available on Amazon, traces the arc of a life organized around movement. Mitsui grew up in British Columbia, and the memoir follows his path from the rivers and mountains of that province toward the competitive dance circuit in Canada and eventually across the Pacific. His background as a professional dancer was serious enough to earn him a credit on the 2004 Hollywood film Shall We Dance?, the adaptation starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez that brought partner dancing to mainstream audiences. That credit locates him in a particular world: one where years of training, competition, and physical refinement constitute the visible tip of an effort most people never see.
What sets Against the Current apart from the typical performance memoir is that Mitsui is less interested in the competition floor than in the people surrounding it. He describes his journey less as a sequence of results than as a series of relationships: the teachers, partners, and family members whose presence shaped what the work actually meant. The memoir’s characters matter more than its milestones.
From the Pacific Coast to the Pacific
In a move that gives the book a particular resonance, Mitsui eventually made his way to Japan, where the memoir describes him building dance studios and raising his family. It is a trajectory with an unforced logic: a son of Japanese immigrants carrying an art form back across the ocean his parents once crossed in the other direction. The studios he built were not just competitive spaces; by Mitsui’s account, they became teaching environments where dance was passed from one person to another, the way it had once been passed to him.
That transmission is the memoir’s quiet subject. Against the Current is less concerned with what Mitsui achieved than with what he was trying to understand while achieving it. By his own account, the purpose he was working toward was always relational rather than instrumental. The championships, the credits, the studios: they were containers for something else.
When the direction changes
The book’s later chapters deal with the disruptions that forced that realization into focus. Injury narrowed what was physically possible. Loss, which the memoir does not specify beyond its presence, altered the human landscape around him. Then the pandemic arrived. Studios closed. Competitions stopped. The entire institutional structure in which competitive and professional dance operates was dismantled, worldwide, without a timeline.
For someone whose professional identity had been built around physical discipline and communal performance, the question that period raised was not simply logistical. It was foundational. Against the Current describes Mitsui’s reckoning with that question: stripping back the external markers of a dance career to ask what the work had been in service of all along.
The answer he arrives at, or approaches, points back toward the values his parents carried from Japan. Perseverance not as competitiveness, but as continuity. Purpose not as achievement, but as relationship. The title refers, among other things, to the resilience of people who move through difficulty without deferring to it, a quality Mitsui traces through his family’s history and into his own.
Against the Current by Michael T. Mitsui is available as a Kindle edition on Amazon. For readers who have navigated significant change in their own lives or are still working out what comes next, the memoir offers something less tidy than a resolution: an honest account of what it looks like to keep going.
