For my thesis goals this week, I have turned to Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. This book is a novel about a woman in British Columbia who discovers a lunchbox with a diary from a Japanese teenager that may have been washed over the Pacific from Japan after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami event. While Marukami’s stories respond to the 1995 seismic event, this book responds to the more recent 2011 event. While Marukami’s text embeds the characters in a peripheral and indirect relationship to each of the characters, the event in Ozeki’s text has a more causal and plot-driving role that sets the conditions for the book to occur in the first place.
In addition to reading the book, I have been collecting passages for analysis. Like the stage adaptation of after the quake, Ozeki’s text is incredible self-referential and self-aware of the narrative frameworks that set the circumstances of the story. Most obvious is the voice of Nao in her diary, which is constantly interrupted by her own speculation about the reader. For instance:
How cool is that? It feel like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me! (Ozeki 2013, p. 26)
Here, the author of the diary explores the potential for a text to actually mediate a human connection regardless of vast differences in time and space. What is remarkable is that the “you” here is both the character of Ruth (who shares the name of the author of the book itself) and me, the reader of the book and diary together as one. There are important layers of reading and authorship, where the explicit reader is simultaneously the author. This may become the core of a model for reading as a method to bridge gaps in space, time, knowledge, culture, and disaster perspectives.
Another aspect of this novel that is driving the evolution of my project is its explicit connection drawn between Japan and the West Coast of North America (in this case, British Columbia rather than the US PNW). Here we have a narrative back-and-forth structure that alternates between a Japanese and BC perspective. This alternate structure reminds me of the ocean tides which truly connect the two shores. This is another gap that is filled with information: seismic information in the form of tsunami waves such as the one on 1700 that traveled from the CSZ to Japan that gives us clues to the history (and future) of earthquakes in the US PNW. However, while there is a back-and-forth structure, there is simultaneously an embedding of the Japanese tale within the structure of reading (and of writing) from the BC perspective. I am talking about these two locations in a binary way, but this may not be an accurate way to treat my two situated contexts. I am wondering how they connect in the context of the Pacific Ocean, but also in the context of culture (earthquake culture) as represented by fiction, literature, and other creative documents.
Goals for next week: To examine the biography of Ruth Ozeki to gather information on her philosophy of art, fiction, and writing as well as her lived experience of seismic events.
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