The first thing Japanese-American writer Ruth Yozeki did in the morning after winning the Women’s Fiction Award was meditation. “Very short,” she says when we meet at her hotel later. She was so convinced she wouldn’t win (Meg Mason and Elif Shafak were the favorites) that she had planned a “full schedule” for the day. “Not that I’m complaining,” she laughs. Cool elegant in black, despite the heat wave, the 66-year-old writer has a kind of brilliance that is not often seen in interviews after the awards ceremony.
Ozeki can certainly claim to be the first Zen Buddhist priest to take the Women’s Award she won for her fourth novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness. It tells the story of 14-year-old Benny, who begins to hear the voices of everyday objects after the death of his father. His mother, Annabelle, has become a collector, and in a sense inanimate things (her husband’s shirts, snowballs, a yellow teapot) also speak to her. Clinging to her work as an archivist, Annabel left their house full of newspaper clippings: they were metaphorically drowning in grief, garbage, and too much news.
Philosophically serious and formally playful (the book itself tells us), this cacophonous novel sometimes seems as crowded and bizarre as Annabel’s eclectic collections. But, as with all of Ozeki’s novels, The Book of Form and Emptiness does not deviate from very real issues – global warming, consumerism, mental illness – or asking the big questions: what is real? Is there a limit to human desires for more? Nevertheless, the chair of the women’s award described it as “complete joy” and critics were drawn to her “calm, dry, methodically good mood”. And it is true that this tale of a mother and son who find their voice and a way out of the mess of their lives is both deeply moving and inspiring.
Each novel takes more time – this is not a good trend
A passionate environmentalist and feminist, Joseki grew up reading Rachel Carson and absorbing the “political consciousness” of the 1970s, she said. Her first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), which she describes as “deep diving into potatoes”, grew out of her fears about climate change and industrial agriculture. Wisconsin). Her later novels A Tale of Time, included in the Booker Prize list in 2013, and The Book of Form and Emptiness were explicitly influenced by Buddhism. The question “Do unconscious beings speak dharma?”, Taken from a Zen parable, is at the heart of this last novel. “Can objects teach us about reality?” She added helpfully. “And, of course, the answer is yes.”
It took eight years to write the book – “every novel takes more time – it’s not a good trend” – but its roots go back to the death of her own father in 1998. For a year later, Ozeki would hear him speak. with her . “I was doing something around the house, folding laundry or whatever, and I heard him clear his throat, and then he said my name. I turned and there was no one. Every time it happened, it was a bit of a shock, like a blow – he’s not there.
Cleaning up her parents’ house in New Haven in 2002 after her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she found gifts given to her father by the First Nation communities he worked with as a linguistic anthropologist and Japanese artifacts. belonging to her mother (also linguistics). a Japanese-born professor), a collection of polished stones 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 the stories were. And that was kind of heartbreaking. “
“So start with the voices,” the book begins. She wanted to study “voice hearing in the spectrum,” she explains. As a writer, her characters “appear”: “Hello! My name is Nao and I am the time, “so Nao in” A Tale of Time “” popped into my head, “she says. Then there are those neurotic voices, the “inner insolence, the inner critic, all these things” that bother us, and even more disturbing are the voices that make Benny stab with scissors and diagnose him with schizoaffective disorder. “Why are some voices pathological, others normal, and others lionic?” She asks. “What is normal at all? The normal is a cultural construction and we made the normal very narrow.
Like Benny, who suffered from severe depression and anxiety as a child, Joseki spent several weeks in a psychiatric ward after suffering what was then called a “nervous breakdown” at a boarding school. Following in Sylvia Platt’s footsteps, as you do “when you are a depressed, poetic young girl,” she then went to Smith College, one of the oldest women’s colleges in the United States, where she learned Japanese (traumatized by the war, her mother never she studied because she did not want to be “identified as Japanese”) and won her first awards for fiction. She returned to Smith to teach creative writing in 2015 and now, after many years on the island of Cortes in British Columbia, she lives full time in Massachusetts with her husband, an artist and environmental teacher.
After graduating, she spent several years in Japan studying classical Japanese literature, then returned to New York and entered the film industry, becoming the art director of low-budget horror films with titles such as Mutant Hunt and Robot Apocalypse. This unlikely experience taught her how to tell a story. After all, she made her own documentaries, and while her films were hugely successful (she was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize), they were “financial disasters.” She took a year to write a novel she hoped to sell for $ 30,000 to cover her debts: she could never have imagined that 25 years later she would be rewarded with £ 30,000 for a woman. reward. She published the first draft of “My Year of Meat” on the eve of my 41st birthday, “so I can honestly say that I wrote my first novel before the age of 40.”
The other side of the sad is usually funny
But after the publication of her second novel and the death of her two parents, she “somehow fell apart” again. So she turned to Buddhism. “Sickness, old age and death – that wakes you up,” she says. “This is what awakened the Buddha. You just realize that life is about impermanence and I won’t be around forever. How to deal with this? Because I actually feel like I’m the center of the world. ” She was ordained in 2015.
The first thing she teaches her students is how to meditate, and she uses meditation techniques in her own writing. “I’ll close my eyes and go on stage in my imagination, and then I’ll just hang out there. You are aware of all the sensations of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. You can see a little more about what’s going on with your characters. “
Does Zen give her work the joy that judges have won? “I just have a weird sense of humor,” she says. “The other side of the sad thing is usually funny. There is a reason Shakespeare always has clowns in his tragedies. Everything is funny and everything is really sad. It’s both at the same time. ” Just like the Book of Form and Emptiness.
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