Ruth Ozeki
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw a number of writers navigate the space between American literary fiction and transpacific cultural experience, working in forms that resist easy categorization. Ruth Ozeki, born on March 12, 1956, in New Haven, belongs to that company while occupying a position distinctly her own — novelist, filmmaker, Buddhist nun, and university teacher, operating across languages and national identities with equal claim to each.
Educated at Smith College and at Nara Women's University, Ozeki works in both English and Japanese and holds citizenship in the United States and Canada. Her career has ranged across television directing and producing, film directing and producing, and literary fiction. Her novels span more than two decades: My Year of Meats appeared in 1998, followed by All Over Creation in 2003, A Tale for the Time Being in 2013, and The Book of Form and Emptiness in 2021. Each of these works extends the reach of her practice without repeating the same formal terms as the last. Alongside her writing, she serves as a Buddhist nun, a vocation that runs parallel to her literary life rather than subordinate to it.
The recognition her work has received is varied in its sources. She has been awarded the American Book Awards, the Dos Passos Prize, the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature, and the WILLA Literary Award. A Tale for the Time Being won the Women's Prize for Fiction. She currently holds the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professorship of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where she teaches creative writing.
Quotes by Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki's insights on:
I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful.
A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.
I would like to think of my ‘ignorance’ less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance.
Do you have a cat and is she sitting on your lap? Does her forehead smell like cedar trees and fresh sweet air?
The cat still seemed to be somewhat there with him, but only as an absence, a cat-shaped hole.
But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children’s history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.
