Her latest novel teems with voices most of them belonging to what she might call nonhuman persons.
The Book of Form and Emptinessis out September 21.
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I am the most conflict-averse person I know, she said.
Her home was filled with leggy plants and shy cats.
She wore a collarless linen shirt, clogs, and a brass pen on a chain.
But mild she is not.
Ozeki, now 65, lived at least four lives before she even started writing.
She published her first book when she was 42.
Her friend and onetime editor Carole DeSanti calls the writer a goes-to-the-root radical.
On September 21, Ozeki will publish her fifth book, a novel titledThe Book of Form and Emptiness.
For Benny, this profusion is torture.
Between the chapters, it coaxes him and us further into the mysteries of speaking things.
How can we live among so many things and not be stifled?
They were Depression-era people, she told me.
They never threw anything out.
As Ozeki was going through her parents basement, she found an empty cardboard box.
Her mother had labeled it in both English and Japanese: empty box.
Ozeki was bornin New Haven, Connecticut.
The 60s and 70s were not an easy time to be growing up mixed race in New Haven.
She turned 13 in 69 and was swept into the eras transgressive, expansive spirit.
I wasnt Black, so I couldnt really fit in there either.
But I wasnt white.
There was a sense thatOh, I dont have to just be quiet and passive.
She and her mother sometimes wrote; she and her father did not.
I was having really serious emotional problems, exacerbated by the culture of the time, she said.
A boyfriend bought her a motorcycle, her first of several.
Cold and hungry, they slept in a church, where they were found and packed back to school.
(She is now a creative-writing professor there a strange, sweet cycle of return.)
In the U.S., she was seen as a small, delicate Asian girl.
In Japan, she was seen as American: tall, loud, swaggering, funny.
It made her fearless.
During her longest postgraduate Japanese sojourn, she fell in love with classical Noh theater.
For work, Ozeki set up an English school and wrote textbooks.
To get a visa, she almost married a butoh dancer whose troupe performed in sex clubs.
She used those skills to make a beautiful and strange Super 8 documentary,Halving the Bones.
Halving the Boneswent to Sundance, but prizes couldnt cover the debt shed racked up making movies.
Ozeki was broke and depressed, and her mother was suffering from Alzheimers.
I realized,Oh, wow, this issomuch easier and cheaper than making a film.
It sold for more than her debts.
Ozeki was suddenly a novelist.
She has a sense of audience, said DeSanti.
She has a sense of the theatrical of the situation.
She also plays metafictional games.
(She gives this Oliver all the good lines.)
Sometimes she makes a sly guest appearance, including a self-portrait inThe Book of Form and Emptiness.
In 2013, Ozeki gavea process talk during the tour forA Tale for the Time Being.
But she also tried to listen inwardly.
Ruth will unpeel the layers of the onion about herself, said her friend the editor Linda Solomon Wood.
The emptiness in the new books title is not nihilism or despair.
Its tied to the Buddhist teaching that the isolated, independent self is a fiction.
Im a self; Im a wave; this is fantastic.
That borderless quality became part of the writing process.
Ozeki admits that she finds objects noisy.
Another book would have a go at quiet the overmuchness of the world.
This is the kind of paradigmatic adjustment an encounter with Ozeki will do for you.
We have a very narrow bandwidth [around] whatever it is that we call normal.
But thats a construct!
I have a sense of normal being, you know,vastvast and all inclusive.
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