JAMES FYFE: Was Writing Something That You Just Fell Into Or Had You

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 Zen 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 zazen 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.

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