Photos: The Oberlin Review, Penguin Books
Language has adhesive properties…, drawing us together by enabling us to share our stories…. By inviting us into another’s skin, novels encourage us to practice empathy. And good novels celebrate the myriad complexities of individuals by creating ample room for all characters to have a voice.
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Each of the three works I have examined in this section thus far—Tuesdays with Morrie, Old Goriot, and Atonement—contains one or more wisdom dialogues under the shadow of death. Tuesdays shows us that dialogue in a relatively simple, classic form: a middle-aged journalist revisits his dying mentor and, drawing on the latter’s wisdom, comes to formulate the advice he would give his younger self. Old Goriot complicates the paradigm by showing its protagonist as torn between the (ironically similar) prescriptions of two older mentors, Mme. de Beauséant and Vautrin—the one noble, the other clearly criminal. Although Rastignac’s actions at Goriot’s deathbed attest to a residual nobility, his challenge to Parisian society on the novel’s final page suggests that lesson will be quickly forgotten, leaving only the implied reader addressed in the novel’s opening to realize such nobility, against all odds. The wisdom dialogue in Atonement only becomes explicit in the novel’s Epilogue, as a much older Briony—the author of what turns out to be an embedded novel—looks back on her youthful “crime” in the face of a coming death from vascular dementia. But it does so in the context of a novel that, from its outset, has been wisely attuned to the ways in which the differing life experiences and assumptions of its characters drive their actions and modes of being in the world.
Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being complicates the wisdom dialogue paradigm in multiple interesting ways. The bulk of the novel comprises two main narrative strands. The first is a diary that sixteen-year old Naoko (Nao) Yasutani has inscribed into a hacked copy of Proust, ostensibly to tell the life story of her 104-year-old great grandmother and author turned Zen Buddhist nun, Jiko Yasutani. The second is the story of an author named Ruth who finds Nao’s diary in a Hello Kitty lunchbox that washes ashore on a remote Canadian island nicknamed “the Island of the Dead” (142). Tale includes a third, shorter but conceptually important narrative strand drawing on the letters and secret diary of Jiko’s son, known in the novel as Haruki #1, a World War II kamikaze pilot who chose to fly his plane into the sea off Okinawa rather than into his target. Hovering over all of this is the novelist Ruth Ozeki, the details of whose life—including her “Caucasian-Japanese-American-naturalized-Canadian” identity, her marriage to an environmental artist named Oliver, her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, and her battles with writer’s block—are mirrored in those of the embedded Ruth, to the point where Ozeki has spoken of Tale as “fictionalized autobiography” (Palumbo-Liu).
Photos: Unnamed girl, Words and Mountains; Jakucho Setouchi, Getty Images
The most classic wisdom dialogue in Tale is that between Nao (pronounced “now”) and her great-grandmother, Jiko. Having lived for most of her first 14 years in Sunnyvale, CA, Nao finds herself back in Japan when her father (Haruki #2) loses his job designing user interfaces for military training games in the dot-com crash. Once there, Nao becomes the victim of relentless bullying. A teacher and her classmates stage a mock funeral for her. Later, several classmates film her in a bathroom dealing with an unexpected period, threaten rape, then post the video online and auction off her blood-stained panties. In the beginning of her diary, Nao speaks of writing through her “last days on earth” (3).
Between the mock funeral and the so-called Panty Incident, as Nao continues to worry that her suicidal father will attempt to kill himself for a second time, she spends her summer at Jiko’s temple. Quickly discovering that Jiko represented “[a]ll the ages and stages, combined into a single time being,” Nao is amused when Jiko suggests (using the English word) that Nao develop her “SUPAPAWA” (176). Jiko teaches Nao to sit zazen, a Zen Buddhist meditative practice that allows Nao to “enter time completely” and, she hopes, “see the world a little more optimistically like [Jiko] does” (183). On a nearby beach, Jiko invites Nao to try to “bully” a wave (192f.). Back at the temple, Nao learns to become resistant to mosquito bites (204). The specifically Zen lesson in both cases is that there is “no difference” between the self (Nao) and the other (waves or mosquitos), that all are born out of the “deep conditions of the universe,” and that (thanks to her superpower) Nao can withstand “astonishing amounts of pain and hardship” (204, 17).
As is so often the case in novels of formation, Nao’s path to such enlightenment is neither linear nor especially stable. Following the Panty Incident, she quits school, begins spending her days at a French maid café called Fifi’s Lovely Apron, and begins going out on ‘dates’. On one such ‘date’ with a particularly creepy pervert, she summons her superpower in two contrasting ways, first going “to the silent frozen place in my mind that was clean and cold and very far away,” then “smacking him hard across the face” (335f.). In time, however, Nao will come to realize that, in this period of her life, “I gave up on myself” (359).
Photo: Tricycle
While participating in an Obon festival up at Jiko’s temple, Nao has a brief and unsatisfying ‘conversation’ with the spirit of Haruki #1. Most of what one might still call their wisdom dialogue comes to Nao in the letters and secret French diary that Haruki #1 addressed to his mother Jiko. From the letters, she learns that Haruki’s exhilaration with the “certainty of death” initially allowed him to “stop worrying about all the silly metaphysical business of life—identity, society, individualism, totalitarianism, human will,” but that, on seeing his mother’s tears, he came to feel that this exhilaration was “preemptive and naïve, as well as selfish” (251f.). He speaks of choosing his death as a Special Attack Force pilot because it satisfies his “filial heart”—Jiko will receive a substantial pension—and because it allows him to regain “a modicum of agency over the time remaining in my life” (256). He then goes on to quote Spinoza:
A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a mediation on life. (257)
From the French diary, Nao learns that Haruki #1 ultimately chose to “do [his] utmost to steer [his] plane away from [his] target and into the sea” (328). For much of the novel, she taunts her father, Haruki #2, for not being the hero that her great uncle had been. In time, however, she will come to see that her father’s refusal to design weapons controllers that insulate soldiers from the effects of their actions by making killing people “so much fun”—a refusal that led to his firing and the family’s return to Japan—was an act of heroism analogous to Haruki #1’s:
I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath…. My dad was a total superhero, and I was the one who should be so ashamed, because the whole time he was being persecuted for his beliefs, I was just pissed off at him for getting himself fired and losing our money and ruining my life. (387f.)
Thus far, I have teased out elements in Tale that one might expect to find in any novel of formation. Thanks to Jiko’s teachings and Haruki #1’s example, Nao comes to transcend her adolescent self-involvement and attains a substantially wiser perspective on the world. What I have not yet explored are the ways in which a conception of selfhood inherent to Western notions of wisdom both is and is not called into question by the novel’s reliance on paradigms from Zen Buddhism, most notably the notions of “interbeing” and “time being”.
Photo: Getty Images
In 2010, as she was struggling with early drafts of Tale, Ozeki was ordained as a priest of the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism, which draws its inspiration from the writings of the 13th-century priest, Dōgen Zenji. In a 2014 interview with David Palumbo-Liu, Ozeki says that her novel “plays very overtly” with the Buddhist teaching that
because everything is impermanent, there is no fixed self that remains unchanged in time…. So what we experience as the self is more like a collection of fluid, interpenetrating interdependencies that change and flow through time.
In one of Ruth’s early Google-fests, as she tries to pin down the reality of Nao, Jiko, and other Yasutanis, she comes across this teaching from Dōgen: “Time itself is being… And all being is time…. In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate” (30). Much of the novel’s wisdom stems from an awareness of these intimate linkages, perhaps best encapsulated in the Zen principle of the “not-two” nature of existence—the push to uncover an essential similarity in the dyads that we (in the West particularly) habitually use to make sense of the world: subject and object, self and other, life and death, mind and words, love and hate, sound and silence, and so on. Ozeki the novelist extends this logic to the seemingly crucial distinction between writer and reader—first by having Haruki #1 write of composing his French diary “for my own benefit, to conjure you [his mother Jiko] in my mind,” then by having the embedded Ruth wonder whether Nao was not somehow “writing her into being” (323, 392). Indeed, speaking of her novelistic practice, Ozeki has said that Tale “is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being” (Sethi).
A great deal of the critical work around A Tale for the Time Being has focused on the ways in which the novel exemplifies and enacts a specifically posthumanist ethics. In a strong reading of Ozeki’s novel, for example, Leslie Fernandez quotes Rosi Bradotti’s suggestion in The Posthuman
that a posthuman ethics urges us ‘to endure the principle of not-One at the in-depth structures of our subjectivity by acknowledging the ties that bind us to the multiple ‘other’ in a vital web of complex interrelations,’ and that by breaking down a ‘fantasy of unity’ we can prioritise ‘the relation and the awareness that one is the effect of irrepressible flows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of.’ (1653)
Keren Omry likewise writes:
It is by moving beyond the privileged notion of the complete and isolated individual and the embrace of the human as systemic, interdependent, and dynamic that communities can evade the chaotic mode of crisis and build ethical bases for coexistence in the twenty-first century. (120)
Photo: Medium
I have no quarrel with the premise that understanding the self as, in Ozeki’s words, “a collection of fluid, interpenetrating interdependencies that change and flow through time” is an important step in realizing an ethics appropriate to our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. And I especially agree with Mojca Krevel’s contention, to which Jiko’s teachings clearly apply, that “[a] permanent self is a delusion that places us in conflict with our environment” (94). The problem, as I see it, is that the “complete and isolated individual” (Omry) or the “innocently stable and unified” liberal humanist self (Lovell 159) against which the posthumanist position tends to assert itself is effectively a straw man—a “delusion” (Krevel 94) or a “fantasy” (Braidotti). There is, to my mind, a world of difference between the liberal humanist, whose commitment to empathy bears an important resemblance to the Zen-inspired conception of “interbeing,” and the true paranoid, whose every action is intended to reinforce the delusion of pure, unsullied selfhood.
Consider again the ending of Old Goriot. In standing above a feminized Paris following Goriot’s burial, Rastignac says in the original French: “A nous deux maintenant!” (literally: “It’s between us now!”) (Père 367). Rastignac clearly thinks of himself as an integral subject out to subdue the object that is Paris, most immediately incarnated in Delphine. But the novel does nothing if not show that Rastignac is a product of his interdependencies, unfolding over time. Balzac’s gender politics may be objectionable and his characters deluded in their belief that they are autonomous actors in the world, but his novel knows better.
In her interview with David Palumbo-Liu, Ozeki remarks: “I find that under scrutiny, so-called distinctions—the disciplines, categories, differences, separations, and oppositions—start to merge and fall apart,” then goes on to say that she cannot “think of a novel that does not have an ethical dimension at its base… what we think of as narrative presupposes an ethical matrix in which characters, writers, and readers are all enmeshed.” Ozeki’s commitments to the Zen concepts of interbeing and time being make for an outstanding novel that is fresh in its temporal and causal structures. But it is posthumanist only to the extent that we understand “posthumanism”—as many have argued for “postmodernism”—to imply a strong measure of continuity with that which came before.
Thus far, I have identified two wisdom dialogues in Tale—Nao’s extensive conversations with Jiko and her (far more spectral) exchange with Haruki #1. But there is a third such dialogue, Ruth’s with Jiko, that illuminates an aspect of the novel that posthumanist readings tend to downplay—namely, the horror that, for Ruth, clearly attends a total loss of self.
Photo: Lenstore
Over the course of Ozeki’s novel, Ruth encounters Jiko in three dreams. In the first of these, she sees an “old nun” hunched over a glowing computer screen. Wearing glasses “not unlike Ruth’s own,” the nun types out answers to a question Nao had asked about elevators: “Up down, same thing. And also different, too…. Not-one, not-two. Not same. Not different” (39f.). She then spreads the black sleeves of her robes “like a crow stretching its wings and preparing to fly” (40). In the second nun dream, Ruth feels compelled to put on the nun’s glasses:
No, this wouldn’t do. The nun’s lenses were too thick and strong, smearing and dismantling the whole world as she knew it. She started to panic. She tried to pull the glasses from her face, but they were stuck there, and as she struggled, the smear of the world began to absorb her, swirling and howling like a whirlwind and casting her back into a place or condition that was unformed, that she couldn’t find words for. How to describe it? Not a place, but a feeling, of nonbeing, sudden, dark, and prehuman, which filled her with such an inchoate horror that she cried out and brought her hands to her face, only to find that she no longer had one. There was nothing there. No hands, no face, no eyes, no glasses, no Ruth at all. Nothing but a vast and empty ruthlessness.
She screamed but no sound emerged…. There was just this—this eternal sense of merging and dissolving into something unnamable that went on and on in all directions, forever. (122)
In this dream, however, Ruth’s sense of horror in the encounter with an absolute selflessness quickly gives way to a state of bliss: “in an instant, her dark terror vanished and was replaced by a sense of utter calm and well-being… like being cradled in the arms of time itself, and she stayed suspended in this blissful state for an eternity or two” (123). In so doing, Ruth attains state of enlightenment anticipated in the writing of Dōgen Zenji, whose work she has begun to examine: “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things” (323).
In Ruth’s third nun dream, Jiko (now identified) again holds out her glasses to Ruth, who puts them on:
The murky lenses smear the world, as fragments of the old nun’s past flood through her: spectral images, smells and sounds; the gasp of a woman hanged for treason as the noose snaps her neck; the cry of a young girl in mourning; the taste of a son’s blood and broken teeth; the stench of a city drowned in flames; a mushroom cloud…. (348)
In a few short moments, Ruth experiences in Jiko’s past several of those instances of state-sponsored violence, especially violence against women, on which the novel often rightly and repeatedly insists.
Photo: Corvid Research
In this dream, however, there is no immediate moment of enlightened bliss. Rather, Ruth breaks the spell by following her talismanic Jungle Crow (previously associated with Jiko) in search of Nao. She meets with Haruki #2 on a park bench and urges him not to commit suicide for Nao’s sake. She then finds herself in Jiko’s temple, where she slips Haruki #1’s secret French diary into the box signifying his absent remains, then falls into Jiko’s arms, which have grown “until they are as vast as the sky at night” (354).
Much of course has been made about the seeming impossibility of Ruth’s interventions here: the presumption that her dream intervention somehow averts Haruki #2’s planned suicide many years prior and that her placement of the diary in Haruki #1’s box allows Nao to read it, to forgive her father, and then to place the diary in the Hello Kitty lunchbox where Ruth eventually finds it. Implausible as they may be, these interventions underscore an important point—that the Zen vision represented by Jiko’s glasses in no way precludes a self that acts ethically in the world and so attains, to quote Haruki #1 in another context, “a modicum of agency over the time remaining in my life” (256).
As the novel draws to a close, Ruth receives a message from a Stanford-based correspondent enclosing the copy of an email in which Haruki #2 reports that neither he nor Nao had committed suicide. Nao is in Montreal studying French and French culture, presumably to read Proust in the original. Haruki #2 has launched a new quantum-based online encryption and security system designed to crawl the internet and erase traces of personal shame, like the video of the Panty Incident. Shortly thereafter, Ruth and Oliver discuss Ruth’s oneiric interventions. When Ruth acknowledges that “[t]here’s probably a simple, rational explanation” for Haruki #1’s diary being in the box, such as Jiko’s having put it there, Oliver counters with “the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics,” according to which “everything that’s possible will happen, or perhaps already has” (394f.).
Photo: The Conversation
Having given us the happy ending that readers (including Ruth) tend to want, in other words, the novel then throws open the possibility of multiple potential endings. Noting that quantum information “is like the information of a dream,” Oliver evokes Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment designed to illustrate quantum physics’ seemingly absurd notion that subatomic particles “exist in superposition only as long as no one’s looking” (397). Against the view that Schrödinger’s cat exists in a “so-called smeared state of being” and thus is “both alive and dead” until it is observed, Oliver cites the work of Hugh Everett, who argues after Schrödinger that the cat is “both dead and alive,” and that the observers of each inhabit distinct quantum worlds (397f.).
In the end, these two models of quantum functioning matter for Tale insofar as they illuminate, and are illuminated by, the role of the reader as observer. In the novel’s Epilogue, Ruth addresses Nao directly: “You wonder about me. / I wonder about you” (402). Consistent with the “many-worlds” vision of quantum mechanics, she recognizes that “not-knowing [about Nao’s current life] keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive” (402). But she is clearly partial to the prospect of meeting Nao in the future, if Nao decides that she “would like to be found” (403). Whereas the novel has repeatedly insisted on the prospect of writers writing readers into existence and, by analogy with the Everett model, has even brooked the possibility of multiple readers inhabiting separate quantum worlds, in the end it settles back into a somewhat more conventional understanding. In an interview with Eleanor Ty, Ozeki speaks of her ending’s “optimistic sensibility”: “We know that by the act of writing that final letter, Ruth is calling Nao into being in the same way that Nao called Ruth into being at the beginning of the book” (169). Ultimately, the novel casts its lot with the vision of an observer—in this case, Ruth as reader—who is both determinate and determinative and who, as such, is party to an ongoing conversation with the characters she has called into being on how best to exist in the world.
In the epilogue to Atonement, an older Briony reflects that “[w]hen I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the [embedded] novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions” (350). Yet her god-like power over her characters means she will never achieve atonement. A Tale for the Time Being effectively hides the writerly self (Ozeki) behind a readerly self (Ruth) while using “the Buddhist understanding of self and no-self” to “play with” the fact that “[e]very act of representation is also an act of misrepresentation”:
So, you can completely buy into the ‘reality’ of that story you are telling yourself about who you are, or you can, through zazen, meditation, and mindfulness practices, understand the truth of no abiding self and learn to hold your story lightly. I think this is very much what the book is doing: it is playing with this idea of how you hold the story of yourself. (Ty 162f.)
In the practice of both writing and reading novels, there is no escaping the self. Indeed, the dialogues between self and other that novels both represent and give rise to are essential to their ethical stake, as well as to their ability to both represent and foster wisdom. Ozeki’s signal contribution is to show how these stakes are advanced not be doubling down on the self but holding the self and its stories “lightly”.
Photo: Medium
By way of conclusion to this section, let me quote a long and characteristically wise extract from Ozeki’s “Confessions of a Zen Novelist” that speaks to the ineluctability of the self and its stories, reflects on a tension inherent to her dual role as a novelist and Zen Buddhist priest, and then segues into an ethically rich reflection on the place of empathy and complexity in novelistic practice:
We are all the stories we tell ourselves. As the heroes of our own I-novels, we never stop conceiving and reconceiving ourselves and those around us. Ever since I learned to hold a pencil, I’ve written myself into being over and over again: I am a novelist. No, I am a priest. Who is this ‘I’ who feels torn between these identities and thinks she can only be one or the other? The problem is clearly one of dualistic thinking, and I don’t have an answer, except to say that by positing these identities in opposition to each other, my relentlessly discursive novelist’s mind (a handicap for a spiritual practitioner) has probably created a problem where none need be. It’s an occupational hazard, since language, the tool of my trade, is also a tool of discriminative thinking and is, by its nature, divisive: it exists in order to distinguish this from that. But language has adhesive properties as well, drawing us together by enabling us to share our stories. And in this regard, I like to think that novels are special. By inviting us into another’s skin, novels encourage us to practice empathy. And good novels celebrate the myriad complexities of individuals by creating ample room for all characters to have a voice. (39)
