As both a writer and Zen priest, Ruth Ozeki
thinks about the concept of time much more than the average person.  Her 2013
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
teaches creative writing at Smith College, in
Massachusetts. 

—

JAMES FYFE: Was writing something that you just fell
into or had you always wanted to be a writer?

RUTH OZEKI: I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Ever since
I was about six or seven years old when I first started
reading books and learned what a novel was, I wanted to
be a novelist, but it took me a while to get there.

As a child I was always writing stories—I went through
a period where I wrote bad poetry, and then when I was
14, I went to a boarding school where there were a lot of
young writers, and we took our writing very seriously.
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
and we ran a literary magazine, and many of us eventually
became writers.

I wrote all the way through college, short stories,
mostly, and then after college I came to Kyoto on a
Monbushō Fellowship, studying classical Japanese
literature at Nara Joshi Daigaku, and I recall starting a
novel then, but I never finished it. At the time I was writing
but privately, for myself, but never sending anything out
or looking for publication. And when I went back to the
States, I had to make a living—and obviously writing is
not a great way to make a living—so I got involved in

the film world as an art director for low budget horror
films, and later, I started working in Japanese television.
Film and television are both vehicles for storytelling, and
although I’d never had great ambitions to work in these
media, I decided to try and make some films, and I did. I
made a couple of independent films, which screened at a
bunch of international film festivals, including Sundance,
but then I kind of ran out of money. It’s difficult and
expensive to make films, and that’s when I finally came
back to writing, because it was cheap. It doesn’t cost
much to write a novel.

Which writers influenced you the most growing up? Did
you read much Japanese literature?

I was always interested in classical Japanese literature,
and in high school I read the famous classical writers
like Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, whom I loved,
although I read them in English translation. (And I have
to confess that most of the Japanese literature I’ve read
has been in translation.) I also remember reading a lot
of Kawabata, Mishima, Sōseki, Abe Kōbō, and Kenzaburō
Ōe. Later, I started reading the more modern women
writers, like Enchi Fumiko, Ariyoshi Sawako, and Yosano Akiko. And then more recently, writers like Ogawa Yōko,
Kirino Natsuo, and Banana Yoshimoto. And of course
Murakami Haruki.

But I think that my tastes in fiction have always been
more Western than Japanese. The writers who’ve inspired
me are too numerous to list, however Gabriel García
Márquez pops to mind, as does Kurt Vonnegut.

A Tale for the Time Being seems to have a touch of
magic realism in it, was this inspired by your reading of
García Márquez?

When I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude I was
about 19 or 20, trekking in Nepal through these crazy
rhododendron forests to some tiny village way up in the
Himalayas… I remember reading that book at night, and
encountering that sense of magic realism, and thinking, “I really want to do that; I want to know how to do that!” I didn’t even know the term “magical
realism” then, but for years I wanted to
write something like that, but I have this
stubbornly realistic and non-magical
brain, quotidian and earth-bound, that
didn’t know how to do the magic thing.
It felt like there was a kind of a wall that
was blocking me, and somehow on the
other side of the wall was this magical
world that I wanted to enter, but I didn’t
know how to get there. So I wrote the first two books and there were no magical elements in those books at all, but I remember for this one [A Tale for the Time Being] I was determined to go to that magical place. I knew more or less where it needed to happen in the book, and as I was approaching that point I was really scared, and I kept
thinking, “I’m almost there, I’m gonna have to make that
step, I’m gonna have to walk through the wall, and I don’t
know how…” And then suddenly I was there, I hit the wall
and walked right through it, and that’s when I realized,
“Oh, there’s no wall there at all! You just write it and it’s
there!” And this was a wonderfully liberating feeling. The
wall was just in my mind the whole time, and that was
great.

How does your process work? Do you work in fits and
starts or is it a constantly ongoing process?

I try to write every morning. The idea is pretty much
to get up in the morning, and sit—I usually sit zazen in
the morning—and then go directly from the cushion to the computer and grab a cup of coffee on the way, and
start to write. I try to write until about 12 or 1. Right now
for example I’m on a first draft of a new novel and first
drafts are difficult, it’s sort of like digging the foundation
and framing out a house or something like that. It’s a lot
of grunt work, and I can usually keep going until about
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
increases. I can edit all day. But getting the first draft out
is hard work.

Your mother is Japanese, did she teach you the language
growing up? 

Not at all! I did not grow up speaking Japanese, which
is odd because both my parents are linguists, so you’d
think that they would have taught me! I started studying Japanese for the first time when I went
to college, and then in my second year,
I came to Kyoto as an exchange student
at Doshisha. At the end of that year, I
still wasn’t satisfied with the progress
I’d made, and it was still really a struggle
to speak, so I decided to take a year off
and to stay in Kyoto and work on my
Japanese. My friend and I also wanted
to travel in Asia, so in order to make
some extra money, we got jobs working
as hostesses at a bar called Kingu Jyōji
Yonsei [King George the Fourth] down
in the Pontochō area. It was an upscale kind of place, and
most of the clients were professors and
kaisha no shachō and doctors, and if I
recall, there were also some Zen priests who would bring their young acolytes, too. Our job was
to pour drinks and light cigarettes and talk. Since they
wanted to practice their English, we’d do that for about
five minutes, and then they would run out of English and
we’d switch to Japanese. So we were basically pouring
drinks and honing our conversational skills for eight
hours a night, and that’s when I really learned to speak
Japanese.