Ruth Ozeki shared her challenges and inspiration behind the 2013 Go Big Read book, “A Tale for the Time Being” with The Daily Cardinal Tuesday.
The Daily Cardinal: Where did you get the inspiration for the book?
Ruth Ozeki: It’s always hard to figure out where the inspiration for a book comes from. It always comes from multiple sources, but I think in this case certainly part of it came from the study that I was doing at the time of the writings of Dogen Zenji, the thirteenth century Japanese Zen master. He wrote those classicals on time, on the subject of time, but it was particularly the one entitled “Uji,” or time being, or being time or for the time being. And that phrase just kind of stuck in my mind because it was an interesting phrase for many reasons.
But there’s also something inherently unstable about that phrase “time being”... And when I was reading the English translation of the classicals as well, that phrase just kept popping up and in a way I kind of kept misreading it as referring to an entity, a being.
And then late in 2006, I suddenly got the sound of this girl’s voice in my head … And it was pretty much the first lines of the book. You know, “Hi my name is Nao and I’m a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well if you give me a moment I’ll tell you.”
And so those little sentences stuck in my mind, and I think the book kind of grew from there. Once you hear the voice of a character speaking, lively and clearly, you sit up and take attention. So I think that was where it started.
DC: This book digs into the gritty realities of tough topics like bullying and suicide, relevant in both Japanese and American culture. Why did you feel discussion on these topics was important?
RO: I think it was more that I had been tracking these kinds of problems for a while. I’d been interested in and concerned about bullying, especially cyber-bullying and suicides that arose from bullying incidents. I’ve been aware of it just because it was very hot in Japanese pop culture.
I became interested in it, and at the time, well a couple of things. One, I think, power is something that all writers are interested in, all novelists are interested in, because whenever you have a power imbalance, whenever you have one person or one political party or one group, trying to exert power over another you automatically, immediately you have a story, you have a dramatic story. I think that power is something that all fiction writers are interested in.
DC: Were there any difficulties or challenges you faced while writing the book?
RO: Yes, the biggest challenge was that I knew a lot about the girl’s story; I knew a lot about Nao’s story. And I knew a lot about her voice and that was very clear to me, but I didn’t know who her reader was going to be. I knew that she was going to have a reader and she knew that she would have a reader, but neither of us knew who that reader was going to be. So, I ended up kind of auditioning characters for the role of the reader. I would sort of invite a character into the story and I would give the character what I have of Nao’s diary and the character would read that and then start to react and the story would kind of emerge from there and I would write it and I would get through about 50 pages, 100 pages and then suddenly the energy would leave it. And I would realize, No, this isn’t right. And so I then I would kind of usher that character to the door and then invite the next one in and we would start the process all over again. This happened about four or five times, I think, until finally at the end of 2010, I did manage to finish a draft that was very, very different than ended up being the finished book. But I finished it, and I was about to submit it to my editor when in March of 2011 the Japanese earthquake and tsunami hit Japan.
And suddenly the world was a different place and I realized that the book that I had just finished was pretty irrelevant at that point. So I went through it and spent several months just thinking about it and tracking what was going on in Japan. I had friends and family there as well, everybody was all very worried and still are.
But then after awhile it raised the question, how do I as a fiction writer, using the tools of fiction address or examine a reality that is so present and so real and so catastrophic. I wasn’t quite sure how to do that, and I knew too that the situation in Japan was going to be ongoing, a situation like Fukushima was not going to go away any time soon. So it became clear to me that this was an ongoing and radically different reality that we were now in. And I realized that the only way to address this or to talk about it was really to break the fictional container and to step in as a character in the fiction myself, so as to bring reality into the fictional world. And so that’s what I did. And so that whole process, and this was really from the end of 2006 to 2011, I think that was probably the biggest challenge that I had was to, first of all, finding that reader character and second of all, trying to figure out how to talk about a tragedy like the earthquake and tsunami in the fictional container.
DC: How was it writing a story with yourself as the main character?
RO: It’s a device that others have used… But, in terms of how it was, it was actually a lot of fun. And there was something playful about it. You’re really pushing the bounds of what’s real and what’s not real. It allows you to play in interesting ways. The way I kind of think of it though is… when a painter paints a self-portrait you would never look at a painting and point to it and say, “Is that you? Is that real?” Of course it’s not real, it’s a painting, it’s a representation. The same holds true for this kind of self-portrait in literature. Words are not more or less reliable than paint. And so in this sense its very much a fictional portrait even though the general shape of the face and the shape of her life resembled mine, I think it’s still a portrait. And it was a lot of fun to do.
DC: What are you hoping students from UW-Madison will learn or take away from this book?
RO: I really do think that my job is just to write a story, and then the reader who reads the story is going to be reading it in a different way and I wouldn’t want to curtail that, I wouldn’t want to limit that by saying these are my hopes for what somebody gets from a book. I really look at book, a novel, as a collaboration. It’s a co-creation. And there are as many different versions of “A Tale for the Time Being” out there in the world as there are readers for the book. And each one is going to be different, because each reader is going to bring his or her own set of experiences. It’s not my place to try curtail that or try to manipulate that in any kind of way.
DC: How did you feel when your book was chosen?
RO: I’m delighted. I’m extremely happy because Madison has always been one of my favorite spots, one of my favorite college towns or college cities to go to. I have family ties in the area too. My father graduated from the University of Wisconsin. So it has always been a university that has had a big role in our family’s history.
The transcript has been edited for clarity.
