A Tale for the Time Being

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Interview : Ruth Ozeki

PodcastThis week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth, Rachel Cochran talks to Ruth Ozeki about writing, Bhuddism, and technology. Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her first two novels, My year of meats (1998) and All over creation (2003), have been translated into 11 languages and published in 14 countries. Her most recent work, A tale for the time-being (2013), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and will be published in over thirty countries

Metamodernism, the Anthropocene, and the Resurgence of Historicity: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and “the utopian glimmer of fiction”

Postmodernism has been characterized by a reductive presentism that suppresses historicity and neglects the possibility of the future. If we have seen a shift from postmodernism to a different cultural logic and structure of feeling—as, indeed, many critics argue—it therefore follows that this may also entail a new dominant in temporal dynamics. In this article, I take Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 as a case study in literary metamodernism, though I also make reference to Adam Thirlwell’s 2011 novella Kapow! and Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being. Across these texts, and primarily in 10:04 as a quintessentially metamodernist fiction, I observe and explicate a metamodern temporality characterized, interconnectedly, by the aesthetics of heterochrony, sideshadowing, and the anticipation of retrospection. Whilst this temporal dynamic emerges from the precarity and volatility of experience in the twenty-first century, anthropocenic climate change has been and remains—I suggest—the greatest catalyst in producing this new temporal experience which resurrects historicity and resuscitates the future as a field of possibilities

Reality beckons: metamodernist depthiness beyond panfictionality

It is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We conceive of this new logic as metamodernism. Whilst some twenty-first century texts still engage with and utilise postmodernist practices, they put these practices to new use. In this article, we investigate the metamodern usage of the typically postmodernist devices of metatextuality and ontological slippage in two genres: autofiction and true crime documentary. Specifically, we analyse Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and the Netflix mini-series The Keepers, demonstrating that forms of fictionalisation, metafictionality and ontological blurring between fiction and reality have been repurposed. We argue that, rather than expand the scope of fiction, overriding reality, the metamodernist repurposing of postmodernist textual strategies generates a kind of ‘reality-effect’

LMU Common Book Lecture: Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker, novelist, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose award-winning novels have been described as “witty, intelligent and passionate” by The Independent, and as possessing “shrewd and playful humor, luscious sexiness and kinetic pizzazz” by the Chicago Tribune. Her first novel, My Year of Meats, was published in 1998 by Viking Penguin and has garnered widespread glowing reviews, awards, and a still-growing readership. A sexy, poignant, funny tale about global meat and media production, My Year of Meats tells the story of Jane and Akiko, two women on opposite sides of the planet, whose lives are connected by a TV cooking show. My Year of Meats was an international success, translated into eleven languages and published in fourteen countries. It won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes and Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versailles. Ozeki’s second novel, All Over Creation (Viking Penguin, 2003) shifts the focus from meat to potatoes in a story of a family farmer, his prodigal daughter, an itinerant gang of environmental activists, and a New Age corporate spin doctor, whose lives and interests collide in Liberty Falls, Idaho. In a starred review, Kirkus called this cast of characters “most fully realized and heart-wrenching in their imperfect yearnings,” and declared All Over Creation, “a feast for mind and heart.” Again a New York Times Notable Book, All Over Creation is the recipient of a 2004 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, as well as the Willa Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction. Ozeki was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, by an American father and a Japanese mother. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College and traveled extensively in Asia. She received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara University. During her years in Japan, she worked in Kyoto’s entertainment or “water” district as a bar hostess, studied flower arrangement as well as Noh drama and mask carving, founded a language school, and taught in the English Department at Kyoto Sangyo University. Ozeki returned to New York in 1985 and began a film career as an art director, designing sets and props for low budget horror movies. She switched to television production, and after several years directing documentary-style programs for a Japanese company, she started making her own films. Body of Correspondence (1994) won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and was aired on PBS. Halving the Bones (1995), an award-winning autobiographical film, tells the story of Ozeki’s journey as she brings her grandmother’s remains home from Japan. It has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival, among others. Ozeki’s films, now in educational distribution, are shown at universities, museums and arts venues around the world. Ozeki, a frequent speaker on college and university campuses, currently divides her time between New York City and British Columbia, where she lives with her husband, artist, Oliver Kellhammer. She serves on the advisory editorial board of the Asian American Literary Review and on the Creative Advisory Council of Hedgebrook. She practices Zen Buddhism with Zoketsu Norman Fischer, and is the editor of the Everyday Zen website. She was ordained as a Soto Zen priest in June, 2010. Ozeki’s latest novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was published by Viking Penguin in March 2013 and immediately hit The New York Times bestseller list. It was also shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. A book signing followed the talk

Ruth Ozeki, Raymond Carver Reading Series, December 3rd, 2014

A video recording of Ruth Ozeki reading her work on December 3rd, 2014 as part of the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program\u27s Raymond Carver Reading Series. Running time: 32:37

The Book of Form and Emptiness

A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and learning to take charge of one\u27s life, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being. Benny Oh is a fourteen year-old boy living in the Pacific Northwest who, shortly after his father dies, begins to hear voices. The voices belong to all the things around him, speaking. He doesn\u27t understand what they are saying, but he can sense their emotional tone; many are angry and full of pain. Benny\u27s voice-hearing is heightened because his depressed and lonely mother, Anabelle, is a hoarder. The first voices Benny hears belong to the things in Annabelle\u27s growing hoard, but soon he is hearing voices not just at home, but on the street and at school. When he can\u27t escape the voices, he starts to talk back to them. People begin to think he is mentally ill. Benny escapes to the public library whenever he can, and slowly a strange new world opens up to him as he gets to know its denizens. He meets and falls in love with a nineteen year-old freegan installation artist named \u27The Aleph,\u27 who introduces him to the \u27Bottleman,\u27 an older, homeless, Slovenian poet in a wheelchair who also hears voices. Benny discovers there are special places in the Library, anomalous or paranormal locations where \u27things\u27 happen. As the novel unfolds, Benny\u27s attempt to deal with the voices and figure out what is real escalates as his mother faces eviction and custody issues, as both struggle to remake themselves and find their own power and agency. With its blend of sympathetic characters, a strong forward-moving plot, and a vigorous engagement with everything from our attachment to material possessions to the climate crisis, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--brilliant, playful, poignant, humane, and heartbreaking. Provided by publisher.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eng_books/1010/thumbnail.jp

Novel Dialogue 3.3: In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)

Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatric psychiatry ward to the enchanted stacks of the public library. The exigencies of environmental storytelling arch over this conversation. Evans asks Ozeki questions of craft (how to move a story through time, how to bring it to an end) that become questions of practice (how to listen to the objects stories tell, how to declutter your sock drawer). And we learn Ozeki's theory of closure: her novels always pull together at the end so that readers are free to continue pondering the questions they raise