The first thing Japanese-American author Ruth Ozeki did in the morning after winning the Fiction Woman award was meditate. “A very short one,” he says when we meet at his hotel later. She was so convinced she wouldn’t win (Meg Mason and Elif Shafak were the favorites) that she had planned “a full program” for the day. “It’s not like I’m complaining,” he laughs. Freshly elegant in black, despite the heat wave, the 66-year-old writer has the kind of glow that is not often seen in post-award ceremony interviews.
Ozeki can certainly say that he was the first Zen Buddhist priest to win the Woman Award, which he won for his fourth novel, The Book of Form and the Void. It tells the story of 14-year-old Benny, who begins to hear the voices of everyday objects after his father’s death. Her mother, Annabelle, has become a hoarder, and in a way, inanimate things (her husband’s shirts, snowballs, a yellow teapot) also speak to her. Clinging to her work as an archivist, Annabelle has let her house be filled with newspaper clippings – metaphorically drowning in pain, rubbish, and too much news.
Philosophically serious and formally playful (the book itself speaks to us), this cacophonous novel sometimes seems as crowded and whimsical as Annabelle’s eclectic collections. But as with all of Ozeki’s novels, The Book of Shape and the Void does not shy away from overly real issues — global warming, consumerism, mental illness — or the big questions: What is real? Is there a limit to too many human desires? However, the president of the Women’s Award described it as “a total joy” and the critics have been attracted by its “calm, dry, methodical good humor”. And it’s true that this story of a mother and son finding their voice and a way out of the mess of their lives is both profoundly impactful and uplifting.
Each novel takes me longer; this is not a good trend
A passionate environmentalist and feminist, Ozeki grew up reading Rachel Carson and absorbing the “political consciousness” of the 1970s, she says. His first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), which he describes as “a deep dive into potatoes”, arose from his concerns about climate change and industrial agriculture. his father’s family were farmers). in Wisconsin). His later novels, A Tale for the Time Being, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013, and The Book of Form and Emptiness are explicitly influenced by Buddhism. The question “Do Insensitive Beings Speak Dharma?”, Taken from a Zen parable, is the heart of this latest novel. “Can objects teach us reality?” she adds usefully. “And of course the answer is yes.”
The book took eight years to write – “every novel takes me longer, this is not a good trend” – but its roots go back to the death of his own father in 1998. For a year later, the book ‘Ozeki heard him talking to her. . “I was doing something around the house, folding my clothes or whatever, and I could hear him clear my throat and then say my name. I turned around and there was no one there. Every time this happened, it was a bit of a shock. , like a fist: he is not there “.
She cleaned her parents’ house in New Haven in 2002 after her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, found gifts given to her father from First Nations communities with whom she worked as a language anthropologist, and related Japanese artifacts. to his mother (also of linguistics). teacher, born in Japan), a collection of polished pebbles from her grandfather’s time in an internment camp in New Mexico, and an empty box, carefully labeled “empty box.” “I knew these things had stories, but I didn’t know what they were. And that was a bit heartbreaking. “
“So start with the voices, then,” the book begins. She wanted to explore “voice hearing on a spectrum,” she explains. As a writer, characters “appear” to her: “Hello! My name is Nao and I’m a being of the time,” so Nao in A Tale for the Time Being “appeared in my head,” she says. Then there are those neurotic voices, “inner sarcasm, inner criticism, all that stuff,” that bother us all, and more disturbing are the voices that lead Benny to nail himself with scissors and be diagnosed with schizophrenia. disorder. “Why are some voices pathologized, some normal, and some lionized?” she asks. “What’s normal anyway? Normal is a cultural construct, and we’ve made the normal very narrow.”
Like Benny, who suffered from severe depression and anxiety as a child, Ozeki spent several weeks in a psychiatric ward after suffering “what was then called a nervous breakdown” at the boarding school. Following in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath, as you do “when you’re a poetic, depressed girl,” she went to Smith College, one of the oldest women’s universities in the United States, where she learned Japanese (war-traumatized, her her mother never taught her because she did not want to “identify her as Japanese”) and won her first prizes for fiction. She returned to Smith to teach creative writing in 2015 and now, after many years on Cortés Island in British Columbia, is living full-time in Massachusetts with her husband, environmental artist and teacher.
After graduating, she spent a few years in Japan studying classical Japanese literature, then moved to New York and fell into the film industry, becoming the art director of low-budget horror films. with titles like Mutant Hunt and Robot Apocalypse. This unlikely experience taught him to tell a story. Eventually, she was making her own documentaries, and although her films were critically acclaimed (she was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival), they were “financial catastrophes.” He was given a year to write a novel, which he hoped to sell for $ 30,000 to cover his debts: one would never have imagined that 25 years later he would be awarded £ 30,000 for the Woman Prize. He printed the first draft of My Year of Meats on the eve of his 41st birthday, “so that I could honestly say that I had written my first novel when I was 40 years old.”
The other side of anything sad is usually funny
But after the publication of his second novel and the death of his parents, he was “sinking” again. So he turned to Buddhism. “Illness, old age and death, it wakes you up,” he says. “That’s what the Buddha woke up to. You just realized that life is a matter of impermanence and I won’t be there forever. How do I deal with that? Because I really feel like I’m at the center of it. world “. It was ordered in 2015.
The first thing he teaches his students is how to meditate, and he uses meditation techniques in his own writing. “I will close my eyes and fall into a scene of my imagination, and then I will pass the time. You are aware of all the sensations in sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. You can notice a little more of the what’s going on with your characters “.
Is it Zen that gives his work that joy that won the judges? “I just have a weird sense of humor,” he says. “The other side of anything sad is usually funny. There’s a reason Shakespeare always has clowns in his tragedies. It’s all funny, and it’s also very sad. It’s both at the same time.” Like The Book of Form and Void.