RUTH OZEKI INTERVIEWED BY JAMES FYFE

JAMES FYFE: Was writing something that you just fell the film world as an art director for low budget horror into or had you always wanted to be a writer? films, and later, I started working in Japanese television. Film and television are both vehicles for storytelling, and RUTH OZEKI: I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Ever since although I’d never had great ambitions to work in these I was about six or seven years old when I first started media, I decided to try and make some films, and I did. I reading books and learned what a novel was, I wanted to made a couple of independent films, which screened at a be a novelist, but it took me a while to get there. bunch of international film festivals, including Sundance, As a child I was always writing stories—I went through but then I kind of ran out of money. It’s difficult and a period where I wrote bad poetry, and then when I was expensive to make films, and that’s when I finally came 14, I went to a boarding school where there were a lot of back to writing, because it was cheap. It doesn’t cost young writers, and we took our writing very seriously. much to write a novel. We thought we were F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin. We were, I fear, quite insufferable and pretentious, but we were very serious Which writers influenced you the most growing up? Did and we ran a literary magazine, and many of us eventually you read much Japanese literature? became writers. I wrote all the way through college, short stories, I was always interested in classical Japanese literature, mostly, and then after college I came to Kyoto on a and in high school I read the famous classical writers Monbushō Fellowship, studying classical Japanese like Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, whom I loved, literature at Nara Joshi Daigaku, and I recall starting a although I read them in English translation. (And I have novel then, but I never finished it. At the time I was writing to confess that most of the Japanese literature I’ve read but privately, for myself, but never sending anything out has been in translation.) I also remember reading a lot or looking for publication. And when I went back to the of Kawabata, Mishima, Sōseki, Abe Kōbō, and Kenzaburō States, I had to make a living—and obviously writing is Ōe. Later, I started reading the more modern women not a great way to make a living—so I got involved in writers, like Enchi Fumiko, Ariyoshi Sawako, and Yosano

2 | kyoto journal 89 On Being a Time Being

As both a writer and priest, Ruth Ozeki thinks about the concept of time much more than the average person. Her 2013 Photographs by James Fyfe novel A Tale for the Time Being was the result of almost a decade’s contemplation on the famous Zen work Uji and is Ozeki’s own personal commentary on “what it means to be a time being, or a being in time.”Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, Ruth grew up in Connecticut but came to Japan during her university years to study classical Japanese literature and Noh theatre. She turned to writing professionally after a stint in the film and television industry and has published three novels—My Year of Meats (1998; excerpted in KJ 40), All Over Creation and A Tale for the Time Being—as well as her essay The Face: A Time Code. Ruth also RUTH OZEKI, teaches creative writing at Smith College, in INTERVIEWED BY JAMES FYFE Massachusetts.

Kyoto, May 28, 2017

kyoto journal 89 | 3 Akiko. And then more recently, writers like Ogawa Yōko, the computer and grab a cup of coffee on the way, and Kirino Natsuo, and Banana Yoshimoto. And of course start to write. I try to write until about 12 or 1. Right now Murakami Haruki. for example I’m on a first draft of a new novel and first But I think that my tastes in fiction have always been drafts are difficult, it’s sort of like digging the foundation more Western than Japanese. The writers who’ve inspired and framing out a house or something like that. It’s a lot me are too numerous to list, however Gabriel García of grunt work, and I can usually keep going until about Márquez pops to mind, as does Kurt Vonnegut. midday or so and then I’m ready to do something else. Once I finish a first draft and get into the second and third and later drafts, and the editing, then my stamina A Tale for the Time Being seems to have a touch of increases. I can edit all day. But getting the first draft out magic realism in it, was this inspired by your reading of is hard work. García Márquez?

When I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude I was Your mother is Japanese, did she teach you the language about 19 or 20, trekking in Nepal through these crazy growing up? rhododendron forests to some tiny village way up in the Himalayas… I remember reading that book at night, and Not at all! I did not grow up speaking Japanese, which encountering that sense of magic realism, and thinking, is odd because both my parents are linguists, so you’d “I really want to do that; I want to know how to do that!” think that they would have taught me! I started studying I didn’t even know the term “magical Japanese for the first time when I went realism” then, but for years I wanted to Noh is profoundly to college, and then in my second year, write something like that, but I have this I came to Kyoto as an exchange student stubbornly realistic and non-magical influenced by Zen, at Doshisha. At the end of that year, I brain, quotidian and earth-bound, that and looking back still wasn’t satisfied with the progress didn’t know how to do the magic thing. I’d made, and it was still really a struggle It felt like there was a kind of a wall that on it, I realize now to speak, so I decided to take a year off was blocking me, and somehow on the and to stay in Kyoto and work on my other side of the wall was this magical that studying Noh Japanese. My friend and I also wanted world that I wanted to enter, but I didn’t was my first to travel in Asia, so in order to make know how to get there. some extra money, we got jobs working So I wrote the first two books and exposure to Zen as hostesses at a bar called Kingu Jyōji there were no magical elements in Yonsei [King George the Fourth] down those books at all, but I remember for practice, too, in the Pontochō area. this one [A Tale for the Time Being] I was through this Zen It was an upscale kind of place, and determined to go to that magical place. most of the clients were professors and I knew more or less where it needed art form. kaisha no shachō and doctors, and if I to happen in the book, and as I was recall, there were also some Zen priests approaching that point I was really scared, and I kept who would bring their young acolytes, too. Our job was thinking, “I’m almost there, I’m gonna have to make that to pour drinks and light cigarettes and talk. Since they step, I’m gonna have to walk through the wall, and I don’t wanted to practice their English, we’d do that for about know how…” And then suddenly I was there, I hit the wall five minutes, and then they would run out of English and and walked right through it, and that’s when I realized, we’d switch to Japanese. So we were basically pouring “Oh, there’s no wall there at all! You just write it and it’s drinks and honing our conversational skills for eight there!” And this was a wonderfully liberating feeling. The hours a night, and that’s when I really learned to speak wall was just in my mind the whole time, and that was Japanese. great.

You also spent time as a graduate student in Japan How does your process work? Do you work in fits and studying with Noh actor and mask carver Udaka starts or is it a constantly ongoing process? Michishige. Do you find there are any similarities between creating a Noh mask and creating a novel? I try to write every morning. The idea is pretty much to get up in the morning, and sit—I usually sit in Well, both take a very long time and require meticulous the morning—and then go directly from the cushion to attention to detail. I was just a beginner, and I only made

4 | kyoto journal 89 two masks, a ko-omote and the other a semimaru, the started studying with him. So it’s kind of funny, because blind priest, but I also studied shimai [dance] and utai here I am, practicing Zen, the religion of my Japanese [chanting] with Udaka-sensei. He was one of the first Noh ancestors, with a Jewish guy from Pennsylvania. teachers to teach Noh to non-Japanese students, and since that time, he’s founded the International Noh Institute. Noh is profoundly influenced by Zen, and looking back on One key aspect of is the focus on overcoming it, I realize now that studying Noh was the self. For a writer who seems to put my first exposure to Zen practice, too, I hold the notion a lot of her own self into her works, through this Zen art form. I really loved how do you feel about this potential Noh, and if I’d stayed in Japan, I would of self quite lightly, conflict? Or do you even view it as a have pursued it further. conflict? and so when I put my ‘self’ into It’s more a kind of paradox or game. I You were ordained as a Zen Buddhist hold the notion of self quite lightly, and priest in 2010. What initially got you a book, that ‘self’ so when I put my ‘self’ into a book, that interested in Zen? ‘self’ is clearly a fiction. The Ruth who is is clearly a fiction. in A Tale for the Time Being isn’t me, it’s The usual: sickness, old age and The Ruth who is in a representation of me, a fictional me. death. I’d always been interested in But when you really start to think deeply meditation, ever since I was a little kid. A Tale for the Time about the self, and try to pinpoint what My grandparents on my mother’s side Being isn’t me, it’s it is, you realize that the self is never just were Zen Buddhists, and when I was one thing, that it’s always changing, that three years old, I met them for the first a representation of it’s always a representation, and that, as time. They’d come to visit us in New a result, it is always made up. And that’s Haven, Connecticut, and I walked into me, a fictional me. what makes it funny and fun. the bedroom one morning and saw them Fictional characters are like shards sitting on the floor doing zazen, and I was astonished by and slivers of a fiction writer’s so-called self, and because this. I thought this was the oddest thing I’d ever seen, and it’s my job to generate characters, I’m very aware of the maybe I imprinted on it too. I was only three, just a little process and how continual it is. Even right now, as I’m person, and they were sitting on the floor and they were telling you about fictionalizing the self, I’m fictionalizing my height, which was cool. I had never seen a grown-up a self. Here we are, talking about writing A Tale for the sitting on the floor before so this was very impressive. I Time Being, but that book was written by somebody six grew up as a half-Japanese kid in the West during the ‘60s, years ago. That person who wrote that book is not the and Asian religions were popular amongst the Beats and person who is sitting here talking to you now. That was the hippies, and so I think this was part of the appeal of a different Ruth. That Ruth was a novelist, a person who Zen. I didn’t really know much about it, but I remember writes novels. And this Ruth is an author, a person who trying to meditate when I was maybe nine or 10, sitting yammers on about writing novels. Very different. in front of a candle not knowing how to do it but I And it’s not just writers. We all fictionalize ourselves, remember really wanting to reach , whatever that all the time. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves, was. When I was 14, I got initiated into Transcendental and listen to others tell us stories about ourselves, and Meditation and did that for a while, and then in college I we either love these stories, or we hate them, and we’re had a wonderful religions professor, Taitetsu Unno, who rarely satisfied with them and are constantly trying to was a Shin Buddhist minister. change the story. It’s kind of funny how we do this, how So Buddhism was something that I was always we get so passionately attached to our feeling of being a interested in, but it was only in the mid-‘90s, when my self. But I see the self as being a relative construct, and parents were getting old and sick, that I got serious. I’m different selves emerge in different contexts, and I like to an only child, and I was taking care of them, and it was a play with this. difficult time, and this is the classic Buddhist story— you encounter sickness, old age and death and you realize, “Oh, shit, I’m not going to be around forever” and “how The Zen tradition also stresses the inability of language am I going to continue to live with this knowledge?” And to express ultimate reality. As both a Zen priest and a that’s when I started practicing seriously. I started in a writer what is your take on language? Tibetan tradition, and then in 2000 I met my teacher, Norman Fischer, who’s an American Zen teacher and Well, language is wonderful! As somebody who works in

kyoto journal 89 | 5 language, it’s a joy to me. Language is a beautiful, beautiful profoundly transformative. tool. Nothing makes me happier than moving words and Just living and getting older changes the way we commas around and making sentences do beautiful, understand time, too. We begin to have a more expansive interesting things. or nuanced appreciation of time as we get older, so in the I also see language as a kind of ritual. It’s a ritual end, I don’t know whether it’s the Zen practice or simply practice with prescribed formal elements, handed down life! I’m more patient now, which is a huge relief. When to us from our ancestors. And when we practice the ritual, we’re young we’re so impatient, right? I mean I’m still speaking or writing, this performance brings us together impatient, but I’ve grown more patient as I get older and and allows us to communicate and unites us as a more accommodating of my impatience. I understand of, say, English speakers, or Japanese speakers. now that patience is a virtue, but impatience is a virtue, But I’m also very aware of language’s limitations and too, at least for a writer. The impatience to tell a tale, to divisive powers. Language also exists in order to separate write a book, to understand what happens at the end of things, to distinguish ‘this’ from ‘that’, or ‘us’ from ‘them’, a story, that’s useful. But when you’re writing long-form and so it has to be used carefully, and sometimes we need fiction you have to be very patient, too, because books are to let go of it altogether. This is one of the reasons I think time beings and they take the time they take. A Tale for the I’m attracted to Zen—because when you’re sitting zazen Time Being took almost 10 years to emerge, and I had lots you’re sitting in silence with others, and silence is this of opportunity to practice patience during that time. vast, beautiful, unifying space where there’s no ‘you’ and But if you’re too patient, it won’t happen either. So you ‘me’. So even while I enjoy language and love swimming need constantly to be pressing into it, pressing forward, around in language it’s a wonderful relief just to let it go. but also to understand when it’s time to let go and step back. It’s about working that edge.

Has your understanding of time changed since you started studying Zen?

My experience of time has changed a lot since I started practicing Zen, and I think this change is mostly a result of sitting zazen. Zazen is basically the practice of being a JAMES FYFE was working as a journalist in time being. Dōgen calls this kind of meditation , New Zealand before he moved to Japan or “just sitting.” You’re just sitting there, being in time, last year. He is currently doing his Master’s watching your stories come and go, with no expectations degree in philosophy at Kyoto University and has recently started a photography project or for any purpose other than that. This experience is focusing on Japan’s aging population. Find him at www.jamesfyfe.com. 6 | kyoto journal 89 kyoto journal 89 | 7