10.13125/2039-6597/3755
This essay focuses on the work of Japanese American writer Ruth Ozeki (b. 1956). Mainly discussing her novels My Year of Meats (1998) and A Tale for the Time Being (2013), I suggest that, through a sophisticated usage of paratextual, transmedial, and autofictional strategies, Ozeki claims for her work a ‘truth power’ that operates at the dialogical border between the textual world and the real world. Ozeki implements, in my view, a ‘truth search’ in which bare facts can be known, and told, only through the fictive, ‘magical’ power of the imagination; this collaboration between factuality and invention, in turn, makes narrative a performative object that can intervene, and foster practical intervention, in the real world.
application/pdf
2039-6597
3755
18
en
Serena Fusco
Between
Transmediality
“Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
9
Essay
2020-02-23
2019-06-10
2019-11-30
2020-02-23
1
Serena Fusco
2019
10.13125/2039-6597/3755
Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale"
2039-6597
18
Transmediality
en
“Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3755/3630
9
             “Each of Them Thin
            and Barely Opaque”:
      Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––


                                   Serena Fusco



Abstract
     This essay focuses on the work of Japanese American writer Ruth Ozeki
(b. 1956). Mainly discussing her novels My Year of Meats (1998) and A Tale for
the Time Being (2013), I suggest that, through a sophisticated usage of
paratextual, transmedial, and autofictional strategies, Ozeki claims for her
work a ‘truth power’ that operates at the dialogical border between the textual
world and the real world. Ozeki implements, in my view, a ‘truth search’ in
which bare facts can be known, and told, only through the fictive, ‘magical’
power of the imagination; this collaboration between factuality and invention,
in turn, makes narrative a performative object that can intervene, and foster
practical intervention, in the real world.



Keywords
     Narrative, Real, Paratext, Autofiction, Transmediality




Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/3755
                                 Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)




         “Each of Them Thin
        and Barely Opaque”:
  Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations

                            Serena Fusco


                                    I
       Born in Connecticut in 1956 to an Anglo U.S. father and a
Japanese mother, Japanese American filmmaker and writer Ruth Ozeki
(pseudonym of Ruth Lounsbury) gained worldwide recognition in
1998 with the publication of My Year of Meats. This bestselling novel
was followed by two more works of fiction – All Over Creation (2003)
and A Tale for the Time Being (2013) – and by the non-fiction piece The
Face: A Time Code (2015), in-between a meditation and an
autobiographical sketch. Prior to becoming a writer, Ozeki directed
two films: Body of Correspondence (1994) and Halving the Bones (1995).
She has been a Zen Buddhist priest since 2010.
       This essay will focus on My Year of Meats and A Tale for the Time
Being – in many ways, her most original works, especially in
formal/stylistic terms. The multifaceted nature of reality, the existence
of many worlds, and how these worlds interact are recurring themes in
Ozeki’s oeuvre, and she experiments with strategies for dealing with
the complexity of the real. Besides, her writing confronts a whole array
of media – from film to television, from the Internet to photography,
looking for creative ways to approach and understand the real at a
time when various technologies substantially mediate and shape access
to it.
       David Palumbo-Liu has written that My Year of Meats «unfolds a
complex and ambivalent stance toward the possibilities of truth



                                                                               1
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



telling» (2005: 56). Among the stylistic and rhetorical devices that
Ozeki employs are diary-like forms, second personhood,
intertextuality, paratextuality, auto/biographical references, and
autofictional strategies. I believe, and shall try to demonstrate, that
Ozeki’s narrative investment in truth telling is predicated on
reconfiguring creative invention as essential to intervening in the real
world, and as opposed to telling the ‘truth’ as a monolithic given. Her
construction of an engaged, ethically charged position, one that strives
for the truth while wielding the power of fiction, includes the choice,
on Ozeki’s part, to foreground her authorship vis-à-vis both the world
of her fictive creation and the real world.
      In My Year of Meats, Jane Takagi-Little is a Japanese American
mixed-race documentarian hired to direct My American Wife!, a series
of infomercials aired in Japan, featuring “all-American” housewives
cooking their best meat recipes. My American Wife! is sponsored by
Beef-Ex, a corporation promoting the export of American meat to
Japan. As the novel unfolds, Jane increasingly violates the Beef-Ex
mandate to feature white, normative families, preferring to film non-
mainstream ones – immigrant, nonwhite, same-sex – in an attempt to
project the image of a diverse, multicultural U.S. However, when Jane
seriously starts researching the meat world, issues of multiculturalism
become only part of the problem. Following the discovery of the
substantial health hazards accompanying meat production and
consumption, Jane takes her quest for authenticity to another level and
makes a documentary film on the meat world in all its gruesomeness
and unsavoriness – showing feedlots, slaughterhouses, and procedures
for the growth enhancement of cattle, including the use of dangerous
chemicals.
      About halfway into the book, a section titled “Editing Room”
provides Jane’s perspective on the complex nature of truth telling:

         Truth lies in layers, each one thin and barely opaque, like skin,
      resisting the tug to be told. As a documentarian I think about this
      a lot. […]




2
                                    Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



        I wanted to make programs with documentary integrity, and at
     first I believed in a truth that existed – singular, empirical,
     absolute. But slowly, as my skills improved and I learned about
     editing and camera angles and the effect that music can have on
     meaning, I realized that truth was like race and could be
     measured only in ever-diminishing approximations. Still, as a
     documentarian, you must strive for the truth and believe in it
     wholeheartedly.
        Halved as I am, I was born doubled. By the time I wrote the
     pitch for My American Wife! my talent for speaking out of both
     sides of my mouth was already honed. On one hand I really did
     believe that I could use wives to sell meat in the service of a
     greater Truth. On the other hand, I was broke after my divorce
     and desperate for a job. (Ozeki 1999: 210)1

      Foregrounding both Jane’s mixed-raceness and her awareness of
the ‘art’ techniques that inevitably accompany the creation of a
documentary, Ozeki complicates any simplistic idea of truth, but if
truth it is an ever-receding horizon, she nonetheless retains and
underlines the importance of going for it. In philosophical/ethical
terms, this passage clearly suggests that truth does it exist as a once-
and-for-all given, and that believing in the existence of truth should
not equate with oversimplifying it. It also suggests that ‘bare truth’ is
rare: truth is usually filtered through the stylistic and rhetorical choices
of the teller. Finally, it suggests that it is possible for a ‘lesser truth’ to
be sacrificed on the altar of a ‘greater Truth’. The novel retains all the
complexity of this ethical conundrum. One way in which Ozeki plays
with this tension without dissolving or trivializing it is by linking it to
Jane’s identity as a hyphenated, mixed-race Japanese American. As
shown in the above quotation, Jane’s problematic role as an


     1
        My reference text is a 1999 Pan Books edition that – I assume for the
sake of grammatical hypercorrectness – drops the s in “Meats”, so that the ti-
tle of the novel becomes My Year of Meat. The s has been reinstated in subse-
quent editions. In this essay I stick to the original title when mentioning the
novel.


                                                                                  3
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



intercultural figure is grounded in her ‘doubled’ identity. Is Jane a
cultural translator, contributing to crosscultural understanding, or is
she a sellout who cynically capitalizes on her position? While the book
provides no easy answer to this question, we should remind that the
discourse of mixed-racedness, and hyphenated identity, is central to
Ozeki’s work. The parallel between truth and race in My Year of Meats
also highlights the entanglement between the investment in truth
telling and the specific issues of authenticity that ‘ethnic’ writers are
bound to confront to a much higher degree than ‘non-ethnic’ writers.
Ozeki is aware that readers tend to mix her up with her characters,
because her identity is «too specific, and too identifiable; if I wrote
about half-Japanese, half American women, readers were
automatically going to assume that this character was
autobiographical» (Smith College Buddhist Studies 2018). ‘Ethnic’
writers, especially women, Ozeki remarks, do not enjoy «the benefit of
sharing an identity with a literary archetype» (Smith College Buddhist
Studies 2018). In this regard, the tendency, for many contemporary
authors, to «deliberately [lead] readers to regard fictional texts as
autobiographic» (Davis 2015: 90), assumes a quite different value in the
case an ‘ethnically marked’ writer such as Ozeki, because it resonates
against a historical and cultural background that has seen, since at least
the 1970s, the simplistic, often automatic, and disparaging ascription of
‘ethnic literature’ to the realm of autobiography and testimony (see
Palumbo-Liu 1995). This tendency has generated much controversy,
and Ozeki openly plays with it. Her irony emerges, among other
things, in the choice of her pen name – a (in Genette’s 1987 terms)
paratextual element that adds an evident touch of ‘Japanness’ and
points in the direction of her hybrid identity, something that the last
name “Lounsbury” does not convey.
      Establishing complex connections among truth, skin, and race,
Jane’s words also resonate with what Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh has
called the “transnational ‘truth’” of race. Petrovich Njegosh (2015) has
argued that race is neither an objective given nor merely false
conscience – it is ‘true’ to the extent that, as a category, it has
historically been, and continues to be, crucial for the construction and


4
                                 Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



perception of the real. This is not tantamount to granting a monolithic,
absolute truth status to race; quite the contrary, the aim is to
historicize, de-naturalize, de-mystify race as a given, examining it
critically as a cultural construct, as opposed to simply stating that, in
objective reality, it does not exist and hence does not matter.

                                   II
      I shall now offer a synthetic overview of some of the textual
choices and stylistic/rhetorical devices that make possible, while
reading Ozeki’s work, to do what Jane does in the above quotation: to
reflect on the importance of the mechanisms of fiction and invention
for an ethical confrontation with the real world, as well as for the
possibility to go for the truth and act responsibly. I shall specifically
dwell on three aspects: 1)the paratextual component at work in the
novels; 2)Ozeki’s confrontation with the multimedia, transmedia
continuum of facts and inventions, words and images, that
characterizes our post-post-modern historical moment; and 3)some
implications of the autofictional strategy implemented in A Tale for the
Time Being, which dovetails with this novel’s interest for “many
worlds” theories.
      Ozeki’s fiction evidently builds its appeal also thanks to the
emotional charge generated by the topical quality of the issues it
tackles. Eleanor Ty discusses Ozeki as one of the «Asian North
American authors [who] manifest an attitude of “critical globality”»
(2010: xiii) tackling broad concerns such as the environment,
reproduction, and health hazards. Rachel Lee maintains that the scope
of political interest in My Year of Meats «also includes the terrain of
biology and ecology […] as they affect the reproduction and vitality of
the population» (2014: 39-40). However, I would remark that Ozeki’s
novels also urge readers to move on from the emotional impact
generated by the real issues around which the fictional world is built,
to an exploration of factual sources and materials, such as websites,
articles, or studies that have initially sparked the construction of the
fictional universe. This effect is obtained by means of intertextual, as


                                                                               5
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



well as paratextual, strategies, that branch both ‘inwards’ (into the
novelistic world) and ‘outwards’ (into the real world), creating a
transtextual, transmedial continuum wherein readers must put their
discerning skills at work.
     My Year of Meats incorporates a variety of textual materials:
documentary interludes, letters, fax sheets, diary excerpts, and quotes
from Sei Shōnagon’s classic of the Heian period Makura no Sōshi (The
Pillow Book). Two problematic paratexts follow the novel’s bulk: 1) a
short bibliography (also listing some contact information and websites)
and 2) a section of four endnotes to the text.2 The first of these two
paratexts is introduced by a peculiar

         AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although this book is a novel, and
      therefore purely a work of my imagination, as a lapsed
      documentarian I feel compelled to include a bibliography of the
      sources I have relied on to provoke these fictions. —J.T.-L. (Ozeki
      1999: 427)

     As noted by Nina Cornyetz, «The very logic of narrative
progression [in My Year of Meats] is one of disclosure or revelation of
unknown or denied truths» (2001: 211). At the same time, the emphasis
on truthfulness is accompanied by a typically postmodern
problematization of the boundaries between fact and fiction. The
paratextual “author’s note” cited above is clearly ambivalent in its (in
Genettian terms) inscription of enunciative responsibility: while
“author” seems to point towards the author of the novel, “J.T.-L.” and the
label “lapsed documentarian” gesture not toward Ozeki, but rather
toward the fictional character/narrator, Jane. Because of the ambivalent
effect generated by the “author’s note”, the bibliography and notes also
end up situated (paraphrasing Genette again) on a paratextual
threshold separating/connecting intratextual and extratextual domains:


      The 1998 Penguin edition also includes, as an appendix, a “Conversa-
      2

tion” with the author. This paratext is absent from my 1999 edition and, to
my knowledge, from at least one more recent edition.


6
                                  Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



should the enunciative responsibility for them be ascribed to Ozeki or
Jane? The author and the narrator/character here overlap and, to an
extent, blend into each other.
      Situated at the threshold between the fictional world and the real
world, the paratextual “author’s note” comes after an interesting
‘slippage’ occurring in the novel’s final chapter. In the final pages, Jane
the narrator/hero vindicates the decision to make the story of her “Year
of Meat” public:

        Like Shōnagon, I have “set about filling my notebooks with odd
     facts, stories from the past…”, or at least this past year, and
     “everything I have seen and felt is included”. However, unlike
     Shōnagon, […] I live at the cusp of the new millennium. Whatever
     people may think of my book, I will make it public, bring it to
     light unflinchingly. That is the modern thing to do. (Ozeki 1999:
     425-426)

      This sudden ‘slippage’ from film to book, from a medium to
another, occurs rather smoothly and is taken at face value in Jane’s
narrative, but the reader at this point knows well that, within the
novelistic universe, Jane has (mainly) been telling her stories in the
form of filmic images, not writing. Such ‘confusion’ can be
enlightening in at least two ways. First, it reinforces, in Palumbo-Liu’s
terms, the sense, on the part of the reader, of another presence in the
novel, «an intelligence outside Jane’s» (2005: 62), possibly the author’s.
Indirectly confirmed by the portrayal of Jane as a character constantly
grappling with, and never overcoming, her own contradictions and
inconsistencies, «It is this doubling», one that superimposes the
hero/narrator with the (ghost of the) author, «that gives the book its
true critical edge» (ibid.). Second, the slippage bespeaks the existence
of a ‘transmedial continuum’ of information – one that connects word-
based and image-based media, fiction and factual documents, wherein
the boundaries of fact and fiction are repeatedly transgressed and
renegotiated in the light of ethically troubling choices, doubts, and
possibly mistakes.



                                                                                7
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



    The ‘dressing up’ of truth amounts to accompanying ‘bare facts’
with «the formal properties needed to make truth attractive,
persuasive, and affective» (Palumbo-Liu 2005: 61): embellishment, if
not downright fictionality. This is reiterated at the novel’s closure,
when Jane offers some reflections on the events that have occurred
during the year that has changed her life:

         In the Year of Meats, truth wasn’t stranger than fiction; it was
      fiction. Ma says I’m neither here nor there, and if that’s the case, so
      be it. Half documentarian, half fabulist … Maybe sometimes you
      have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes. (Ozeki
      1999: 425)

      While, on the one hand, we can see this as the mark of a
fundamental undecidability and overall blurring of any distinction
between fact and fiction, we can also discern a practical, productive
aspect to this blend. In the quotation above, the text underlines the
matter of praxis: what to do in order to produce, hinder, or alter certain
outcomes? On the one hand, this question pertains to an ethical sphere.
On the other, it must be addressed in the artistic domain: the passage
clearly comments on the power of fiction to shape, re-create reality by
telling “truths that alter outcomes”. Nicholas Frangipane maintains
that, in the context of an epistemological shift from postmodernism to
“post-postmodernism”, a number of recent literary texts seem to
suggest that «while stories cannot tell the truth of an event, they are
still a viable and important way to know, and we must tell them,
because, although they are faulty tools, they are essential for
understanding» (2016: 528, emphasis in the original). Despite the
impossibility to establish the “truth” once and for all, stories still serve
a «practical function», tapping into «the productive power of narrative
when the facts are not enough» […] (Frangipane 2016: 529). This echoes
Rocío Davis’s discussion of the strategy employed by Ozeki in her 1995
film Halving the Bones (released under the name of Ruth Ozeki
Lounsbury), in which she blends fact and fiction to tell the
interconnected stories of her mother and grandmother: «[Ozeki]


8
                                  Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



justifies her creative strategy by explaining that she needed stories,
even if they had to be invented, to understand her family» (Davis 2015:
100). In other words, creative storytelling can be regarded, to
paraphrase Jane, as an ever-diminishing truth approximation that will
bring us, nevertheless, as close to the truth as possible.

                                   III
      Ozeki’s most recent novel to date, A Tale for the Time Being (2013),
transposes onto a more markedly metaliterary level much of the
thematic and stylistic tension between fact and fiction already present
in the author’s previous work, while at the same time embarking on an
autofictional turn and openly confronting the possibility of ‘many
worlds’, in theoretical and narrative terms.
      A Tale for the Time Being presents a structure that alternates two
voices/storylines. (This alternation also makes room, at certain points,
for other materials.) In such bipartite mode, the book follows two
protagonists, Nao and Ruth. Naoko “Nao” Yasutani is a Japanese
American teenager whose family, who had moved to the Silicon Valley
soon after her birth, has been forced to move back to Japan after the
burst of the so-called “dot-com” financial bubble, because the father
has lost his job as a computer programmer. Nao’s story is narrated in
her diary, in which she recounts – in a surprisingly ironic, even light-
hearted tone – her tough life in Tokyo: a discriminated “transfer
student”, she is relentlessly bullied and sexually harassed in school,
lives in a disreputable neighborhood, and her unemployed father
repeatedly attempts suicide. At the beginning of her narrative, Nao
suggests that she also intends to end her life. Prior to this, however, she
will write the remarkable story of her paternal great-grandmother, one-
hundred-and-four-year-old Jiko Yasutani – a writer, a feminist, an
anarchist, and a Buddhist nun. However, while Nao narrates about
“old Jiko”, she becomes distracted by the events in her own life, events
that trickle into the narrative and soon become the main part of it.
      In a section immediately following Nao’s first, the diary is found
by Ruth, a Japanese American writer living with husband Oliver and a


                                                                                9
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



cat named Schrödinger on an isle off the coast of British Columbia.
Besides her given name, this fictional character shares a number of
traits with real-life Ozeki: a husband named Oliver, a residence in
British Columbia, a friend who is a professor at Stanford, a late mother
named Masako who had Alzheimer’s, a double Japanese and U.S.
American background – and, or course, her profession. Ruth finds
Nao’s diary washed upon the beach, inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox
wrapped in plastic, together with an old military watch, a package of
letters handwritten in Japanese, and another diary written in French.
The last item will turn out to be written by Haruki #1, Nao’s great-
uncle and Jiko’s son, who died in WWII. Nao’s diary has been hidden
in a faded red book cover bearing the Proustian title À la recherche du
temps perdu. From this moment on, the text alternates portions of Nao’s
diary with sections about Ruth reading Nao’s diary and becoming
engrossed in the girl’s story.
      In a recent essay on the contemporary rise of autofiction and the
narrative effects generated by this genre, Marjorie Worthington
stresses its “truth power”. Paradoxically, yet perhaps not surprisingly,
the main “truth claim” that is made by – and through – the
autofictional texts analyzed by Worthington is a claim on the powers of
fiction, «the gesture toward abstract truth that we typically associate
with the novel» (Worthington 2017: 481). At the same time, elaborating
on Timothy Dow Adams, Worthington remarks that autofiction keeps
readers in a state of continuous interrogation as to the precise degree of
fictionality vs. factuality in the texts. How much of what is told in an
autofiction is fact, albeit within a mainly fictional universe?
      In A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth is suffering from a writer’s block.
While many contemporary autofictions follow a main character –
bearing the same name as the author – in the process of writing a
novel, or dealing with the implications of his work as a writer, Ruth’s
role in A Tale for the Time Being, despite her profession, is not mainly
that of a writer, but, instead, that of a reader. This choice evokes what
Ozeki has called the “collaboration” that involves writers and their
readers in co-dependence:



10
                                   Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



        I sit in my little cabin in the woods and think up things and
     write them down, and eventually, several years down the road,
     you, for whatever reasons, pick up my novel and apply your eyes
     and minds and imaginations to it, and, through that process,
     which is a kind of magic or alchemy, really, the novel realizes
     itself. (Ozeki 2008: 13-14).

     The relationship between Nao and Ruth is one between a writer
(Nao) and a reader (Ruth) evoked through an explicit address. As
reader and writer, Ruth and Nao are entangled and bring each other
into existence:

        Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what
     a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. 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. As for me,
     right now I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity
     Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your
     past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about
     you, somewhere in my future. And if you’re reading this, then
     maybe by now you’re wondering about me, too. (Ozeki 2013: 3)

      Despite the obvious spatial and temporal distance separating her
from Nao, and despite her doubts about the diary’s authenticity, Ruth
feels the urge to read on, to find out more about Nao, and the more she
reads, the more she feels the need to intervene in the girl’s troubled
life. Fulvia Sarnelli has stressed the highly subjective, emotional, even
intimate connection that Ruth develops with «both Nao’s story and the
diary as a text-object» (2017: 398). Sarnelli claims that «Ruth’s
interaction with the diary is primarily and most importantly aimed at
getting to know Nao “personally”» (2017: 404). In contrast with the
rational approach displayed by Oliver and her friends and
acquaintances on the island, who seem bent on learning about, and
relying on, provable facts, both regarding the long journey of the diary
across the sea and Nao’s narrative, Ruth’s «attitude, instead, is much
more engaged, emotional, and urgent to the point of becoming


                                                                                11
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



sometimes hysterical, since she partakes in the events as if she had a
specific role in them» (Sarnelli 2017: 407). I would suggest that A Tale
for the Time Being reprises, in modified form and content but also on a
different scale, the urge to search for the truth that was already present
in My Year of Meats. The truth-search in A Tale for the Time Being is,
evidently, more ‘private’ than the one occurring in My Year of Meats;3 it
must be noted, however, that this privacy begets concerns that enlarge
the novel’s frame of reference way beyond a one-to-one exchange
between Nao and Ruth: among such matters – once again, of ‘global’
scope and relevance – are broad environmental issues, such as oceanic
gyres and the causes of the tsunami, and the Buddhist doctrine of
interconnectedness of all beings. Moreover, granted all her personal
investment in the diary, a collective reading space becomes crucial for
Ruth to make sense of it and the other materials found in the Hello
Kitty lunchbox. For instance, she must rely on friends to translate for
her both Haruki #1’s letters and his secret diary. In my view, A Tale for
the Time Being problematizes, even satirizes an idea of ‘the public’ as a
space of expertise ownership, exclusive readings, and recognized,
once-and-for-all established truths. Ozeki re-opens ‘the public’ as a
space of shared readership. The community in which Ruth finds her
place again, with a renewed sense of belonging, at the end of the novel,
is one where others can share the act of reading with her (Sarnelli 2017:
412).
      A Tale for the Time Being also expands the paratextual strategy
already at work in My Year of Meats. The 2013 novel is provided with a
long final section of 165 endnotes; six appendixes, from A to F; and a
final bibliography listing 19 reference titles. The endnotes mainly
function like reader’s notes, containing Ruth’s comments on specific


      3
        Jane unearths disturbing information on the correlation between meat
consumption, the spread of diseases, including lethal ones, and human infer-
tility rates. If the denouement of the truth search has more evidently ‘public’
tones in My Year of Meats, Jane’s motivations for carrying it forward include a
very private and personal aspect: namely, the fact that she is reproductively
challenged.


12
                                 Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



parts of Nao’s diary and clarifying many of the Japanese terms used by
the girl in the middle of her predominantly English-language writing.
These notes reinforce Ruth’s role as reader, while also, inevitably,
contributing to blurring the separation between Ruth (the character)
and Ozeki (the author). The situation is further complicated by a
discrepancy: Ruth is a character in a story(line) told in the third person
by a heterodiegetic narrator, whereas the notes are written in the first
person. This choice of narrative person further problematizes the issue
of their enunciative responsibility.4
       Her emotional, apparently non-rational attitude notwithstanding,
Ruth researches the Internet for clues that may corroborate the
truthfulness/authenticity of Nao’s story, and/or provide hints as to the
girl’s current whereabouts. The web searches she launches yield no
results, with two exceptions. About one-third into the book, Ruth finds
a link to an article in a scholarly database, which, from the limited
preview, looks like a study of the literary work of Jiko Yasutani. Ruth
is elated by the discovery: «Ruth hadn’t realized just how keenly she’d
been waiting for this corroboration from the outside world that the nun
of her dreams existed, and that Nao and her diary were real and
therefore traceable» (Ozeki 2013: 150). However, to her frustration, the
attempts to retrieve the article end up in nothing: initially, a blackout
prevents her from accessing the database; finally, she learns that the
essay has, for unspecified reasons, been removed.
       This episode looks to me like an ironic intratextual version of
what Ozeki’s readers can feel tempted to do when reading her work:
i.e., search – via the Internet – for elements that may corroborate the
authenticity/reliability of her sources. On the other hand, the novel
suggests that factual sources must be supplemented by the re-creative
powers of the imagination, which comprise acts of both reading and
writing.



     4
       There are also Ruth’s notes to her own sections, mainly used to ex-
plain references to quantum computing and quantum mechanics in the last
part of the novel.


                                                                              13
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



     At the same time, the book repeatedly reflects on the fragility of
memory – for instance, through the figure of a mother suffering from
Alzheimer’s, a recurring presence in Ozeki’s oeuvre.5 In her anxiety
about developing the same illness, Ruth worriedly records her own
memory slippages. If the whole novel is an attempt at fostering
memory and reconnecting with ‘lost time’ – as reinforced by the
Proustian reference – Ozeki simultaneously makes it clear that the loss
or cancellation of memory can also be blessings. Evidence of this are
the Internet videos, uploaded by her schoolmates, that record Nao’s
bullying and shaming. Nao’s father and Ruth discuss this when they
meet in a dream of Ruth’s (I shall return to this dream sequence
shortly):

         “[…] She was getting bullied. They were posting horrible things
      about her on the Internet.”
         He sighs and hangs his head. “I’m a programmer, but there was
      nothing I could do. Once stuff is up there, it sticks around, you
      know? Follows you and it won’t go away.”
         “Actually, I’ve been having the opposite experience,” she says.
      “Sometimes I’ll search for something, and the information I’m
      looking for is there one minute, and then the next minute, poof!”
      (Ozeki 2013: 351-352)

      Nao’s father, Haruki #2, will later claim to have created two
software bugs able to remove materials from the web or make them
irretrievable, thus removing the stigma attached to his daughter’s
name and possibly allowing a fresh start for her.
      In the end, the novel points to the inevitable, yet welcome
incompleteness that accompanies all narratives and processes of
knowledge. In Ruth’s own words (finally in the first person and
directly addressed to Nao):



      5Momoko, the protagonist’s mother in Ozeki’s second novel All Over
Creation, also suffers from Alzheimer’s.



14
                                   Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



        In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-
     knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just
     dream that? Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I
     think maybe it’s true, even though I don’t really like uncertainty.
     I’d much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the
     possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive. (Ozeki 2013: 402)


                                     IV
      The most evident transgression of both verisimilitude and the
boundaries between narrative worlds in A Tale for the Time Being is
Ruth’s intervention in Nao’s story via a dream. In an oneiric sequence,
Ruth finds herself by a pond, where Nao’s father, Haruki #2, is sitting
on a bench. Following their conversation, Haruki #2 relinquishes his
suicidal plans, pledges to help his daughter, and departs. Later in the
same dream sequence, Ruth places Haruki #1’s secret French diary in a
box on an altar in Jiko’s monastery. Outside the dream, Nao and
Haruki #2 eventually find the diary and realize that, instead of killing
war enemies and being killed in a kamikaze attack during WWII,
Haruki #1 had preferred to die by flying his plane into the sea and
away from its target, so as to spare lives. This ‘unpatriotic’ act is told in
the secret diary addressed to his mother Jiko. Haruki #1’s diary is a key
plot element – one that performs what Marie-Laure Ryan (2011, 2006)
would call a “transworld” travel, from Ruth’s here and now to Nao’s,
altering Nao’s story as a consequence of Ruth reading it. Ozeki enacts,
in other words, «a merging of paths» between worlds, «despite the
logical contradiction inherent in the phenomenon» (Ryan 2006: 655).
      Ruth’s dream is also followed by the reappearance of Nao’s
writing on the final pages of her diary, that had mysteriously gone
blank. When Ruth and Oliver discuss this rationally inexplicable
network of events, the novel openly evokes “possible world” theories,
from Erwin Schrödinger’s famous imaginary experiment involving a
cat and a box to the so-called “many worlds” interpretation of
quantum mechanics usually associated with Hugh Everett III. Starting
from quantum mechanics, Appendixes B and E further articulate the



                                                                                15
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



topics of entanglement, indeterminacy and co-possibility by linking
them to the novel’s Zen Buddhist theme and frame of reference:

         The many-worlds interpretation […] challenges [the] theory of
      wave function collapse, positing instead that the superposed
      quantum system persists and branches.
         At every juncture – in every Zen moment when possibilities
      arise – a schism occurs, worlds branch, and multiplicity ensues.
         Every instance of either/or is replaced by an and. And an and,
      and an and, and an and, and another and … adding up to an
      infinitely all-inclusive, and yet mutually unknowable, web of
      many worlds. (Ozeki 2013: 415)

      On the occasion of a recent lecture given at Smith College, Ozeki
has offered a remarkable explanation for her choice to “step into” the
novelistic universe. At the beginning of 2011, Ozeki had completed a
first draft of A Tale for the Time Being. Before she could submit it,
though, on March 11, 2011 the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck
Japan, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown followed suit. In the
wake of these terrible events, Ozeki continues,

         It hit me that the novel I’d written was no longer relevant.
      Certain catastrophic events create a rift, dividing time into before
      and after. […] So I couldn’t go forward with the book. […] Months
      passed, but Nao’s voice just kept coming back and wouldn’t leave
      me alone. I talked this over with my husband, Oliver, and he
      made a suggestion. He pointed out that the devastating reality of
      the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown had broken the
      world, and it had certainly broken the fictional world of my novel.
      The only way forward, then, was to acknowledge this brokenness,
      and the way to do this was to step into the novel myself, as a
      character – a ‘real person’ in a fiction – and this would break
      down the seamless illusion of a fictional world, and allow it to
      stay broken. So Nao’s reader had to be me – and the earthquake,
      and tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, these awful catastrophic but




16
                                   Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



     very real factors, had to become part of the story. (Smith College
     Buddhist Studies 2018)

      What Ozeki suggests here is that the historical rift caused by the
Tōhoku earthquake and its awful consequences could be (at least
partly) tackled, in narrative terms, through an encounter between
worlds with different ontological statuses, thus allowing for the power
of the imagination to ‘make sense’ of these “very real”, tragic factors.
Seen from the perspective of Ozeki the writer, these time-splitting
events had created a diverging line in historical time, and in that
diverging world Ozeki’s book had become a relic prior to its
completion. This divergence has been both acknowledged and
recuperated by means of an encounter between factual and fictional
worlds, and perhaps through the creation of an in-between world of
possibility with tendrils going in both directions.
      Life and identity, Ozeki has suggested in an interview, are
nothing but stories people tell themselves (Ty 2013: 162). Rocío Davis
proposes to «[consider] narrative as a defining feature» (2015: 90) of
contemporary fictional texts that make overt autobiographical
gestures, among which A Tale for the Time Being. Davis argues that
genre distinctions matter less than we tend to think: «So, perhaps, we
can conclude […] with the words Jiko tells Nao at the end of their
story: “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories”» (Davis 2015:
102). I would like to second Davis’s reading while reiterating a point
that I hope has already emerged in the course of this essay. Both A Tale
for the Time Being and My Year of Meats certainly suggest that life,
stories, and the different media, codes, and genres through which we
tell stories, real and/or invented, are part of a ‘continuum’.
Simultaneously, I believe that Ozeki’s oeuvre neither discards nor
trivializes the impulse to discriminate between truth and falsehood: to
the contrary, the truth is valorized inasmuch as it can be accessed not
by relying on ‘bare facts’, but instead through the indispensable aid of
the imagination. After all, Ruth’s ‘magical’ intervention in Nao’s world
makes it possible for Nao and Haruki #2 to learn the truth about
Haruki #1 – a truth on compassion and nonviolence that had been


                                                                                17
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



obscured by the official narrative of state militarism. And this
discovery does make a difference: by relying on the transformative,
performative power of Haruki #1’s narrative, Nao and Haruki #2 will
radically alter their own courses, and decide to live on instead of
dying. Narrative spurs praxis – possible answers to the question what
to do now?
      To conclude, I maintain that Ozeki claims a (quoting
Worthington) “truth power” for her writing that does not merely
operate within the textual realm, but also at the dialogical border
between the textual realm and the real world. As the author has stated,
discussing A Tale for the Time Being:

         By proposing a fictionalized autobiography like this, especially
      in a day and age of the Internet where information is ubiquitous—
      and certainly Ruth is obsessed with researching things—there is a
      kind of invitation to the reader to research and find out. The book
      could be a treasure hunt—or better yet, a scavenger hunt—if
      someone wanted to take it that way, because a lot of stuff in the
      book has tendrils reaching out into the real world. (Ty 2013: 165)

      Then again, what are the most apt strategies for learning the truth,
and/or telling the truth, at a time when information surfaces on,
plunges under, and resurfaces on the waves of various technologies –
and also, inevitably, blends and blurs not only writing genres, but also
various languages and media codes? «Information is a lot like water;
it’s hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away» (Ozeki
2013: 197). Perhaps, in line with the Buddhist framework pervading the
novel, limiting the struggle, being able to let go, and not becoming
obsessively attached to one’s one-directional efforts, may actually be
the most apt strategies.




18
                                   Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)




                              Works Cited
Cornyetz, Nina, “The Meat Manifesto: Ruth Ozeki’s Performative
     Poetics”, Women and Performance: A Journalist of Feminist Theory,
     12.1 (2001): 207-224.
Davis, Rocío G., “Fictional Transits and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time
     Being”, Biography, 38.1 (Winter 2015): 87-103.
Frangipane, Nicholas, “Freeways and Fog: The Shift in Attitude
     between Postmodernism and Post-Postmodernism from The Crying
     of Lot 49 to Inherent Vice”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,
     57.5 (2016): 521-532.
Genette, Gérard, Seuils, Paris, Seuils, 1987.
Lee, Rachel C., The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Bioso-
     ciality, and Posthuman Ecologies, New York-London, New York Uni-
     versity Press, 2014. Kindle Edition.
Ozeki, Ruth, A Tale for the Time Being, Edinburgh-London, Canongate,
     2013. Kindle Edition.
Id., “The Seeds of Our Stories”, Moebius, 6.1 (2008): 13-25.
Id., My Year of Meat, London, Pan Books, 1999.
Palumbo-Liu, David, “Rational and Irrational Choices: Form, Affect,
     and Ethics”, Minor Transnationalism, Eds. Françoise Lionnet - Shu-
     mei Shih, Durham-London, Duke University Press, 2005, 41-72.
Id., Ed., The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, Min-
     neapolis-London, University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Petrovich Njegosh, Tatiana, “Introduzione. La ‘realtà’ e ‘verità’ trans-
     nazionale della razza”, Iperstoria: Rivista di Studi di Americanistica e
     di Anglistica, 6 (Fall 2015): 1-7.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Narrative/Science Entanglements: On the Thou-
     sand and One Literary Lives of Schrödinger’s Cat”, Narrative, 19.1
     (2011): 171-186.
Id., “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism
     in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, Poetics Today, 24.7 (2006):
     633-674.


                                                                                19
Serena Fusco, “Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations



Sarnelli, Fulvia, “When the Transpacific Encounter Becomes a
    Contagious Fluke: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”, Harbors,
    Flows, and Migrations: The USA in/and the World, Eds. Vincenzo
    Bavaro - Gianna Fusco - Serena Fusco - Donatella Izzo, Newcastle
    Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 397-412.
Ty, Eleanor, “‘A Universe of Many Worlds’: An Interview with Ruth
    Ozeki”, MELUS, 38.3 (Fall 2013): 160-171.
Id., Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives,
    Minneapolis-London, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Worthington, Marjorie, “Fiction in the ‘Post-Truth’ Era: The Ironic
    Effects of Autofiction”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58.5
    (2017): 471-483.



                                     Sitography
Smith College Buddhist Studies, Ruth Ozeki, “The Contemplative ‘I’: Zen
   and the Art of Autobiographical Fiction” (November 12, 2018),
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60Z0SNYZPgc, web (last ac-
   cessed June 9, 2019).




20
                                  Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)




                              The Author
Serena Fusco

      Serena Fusco teaches Comparative Literature at the University of
Naples “L’Orientale”. Her most recent book is Confini porosi. Pelle e
rappresentazione in quattro narrazioni della modernità [Porous Borders: Skin
and Representation in Four Narratives of Modernity] (Scripta, 2018). Her
research is multilingual and transcultural in scope and includes
Chineseness in the transnational space, Asian American literature,
visual culture and photography, and the internationalization of
education.

      Email: sfusco@unior.it; serenafusco@gmail.com



                              The Article
Date sent: 31/05/2019
Date accepted: 30/10/2019
Date published: 30/11/2019



                      How to cite this article
Fusco, Serena, ““Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque”: Ruth Ozeki’s
Truth Approximations”, Fictions. Truth, Lies, Possible Worlds, Eds. R.
Galvagno – M. Rizzarelli – M. Schilirò – A. Scuderi, Between, IX.18
(2019), www.betweenjournal.it




                                                                               21
