Do you enjoy the opportunity to reflect on a book and how it's interpreted? We met for coffee in the West Village on a blisteringly cold day in January.īUSTLE: I want to know how you feel about author interviews. I talked with Ozeki about her book, the idea of "now," Buddhism, and how Tale came to be. This is the fourth novel from filmmaker and Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki, and her Tale is a stroke of the most wonderful fortune.
A central theme is this relationship between reader and writer: how a writer can shape the reader's life, how the reader can identify and feel kinship with an improbable writer. As Ruth reads about Nao's life in Japan - the abusive bullies at her school, her wise Buddhist grandmother, her unemployed and depressed father - she finds herself absorbed in the girl's story. The diary of Nao, a 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl, acts like the patch of flotsam and debris that carried it from Japan: it forcefully draws in Ruth, the novelist who finds it while walking on her Canadian beach. The GPGP is a key catalyst and image in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being. Condoms, plastic six-pack rings, plastic bags, water bottles, marine debris all float and whirl in the GPGP. The GPGP is in the middle of a gyre, a circular-moving current of water that draws in and traps debris. And we're all floating around, bumping into each other at random, like bits of trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the massive body of debris and trash floating in the Pacific Ocean. What's a time being? You, reading this, are a time being, along with everyone else who is, was, or has been.
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