Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being recently won the Kitschie Red Tentacle, which rewards “the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.” A UK award, its aim is to “encourage and elevate the tone of the discussion of genre literature in its many forms.” Ozeki was unable to attend the February award ceremony, lamenting that “When I wrote myself into my novel, as the character Ruth, I failed to anticipate the consequences, and now, like Ruth, I find myself marooned on a remote island in Desolation Sound, trapped in a fictional world of my own creation, unable to get away. It is a conundrum that you, at the Kitschies, will no doubt understand.”
Critic Edward Fowler in his 1988 study, The Rhetoric of Confession, discusses shishōsetsu, the early twentieth century Japanese novel form, and Ozeki quotes from his introduction:
The shishōsetsu (more formally watakushi shōsetsu; commonly translated as “I-novel”) [is] an autobiographical form that flourished in Taishō Japan (1912–26). The shishōsetsu, narrated in the first or third person in such a way as to represent with utter conviction the author’s personal experience, is riddled with paradoxes. Supposedly a fictional narrative, it often reads more like a private journal. It has a reputation of being true, to a fault, to “real life”; yet it frequently strays from the author’s experience it allegedly portrays so faithfully. Its personal orientation makes it a thoroughly modern form; yet it is the product of an indigenous intellectual tradition quite disparate from western individualism. Progressive critics have ridiculed it over the decades as a failed adaptation of the western novel, while traditionalists have reveled in its difference.
A Tale for the Time Being’s point-of-view characters are Ruth, a writer, and Naoko Yasutani, a depressed Tokyo schoolgirl. Nao’s diary washes up on the beach on Cortes Island in British Columbia, where both Ruth Ozeki and the character Ruth live.
The character Ruth becomes obsessed by Naoku, whose diary she finds sealed in a ziplock bag tucked inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox, flotsam that crossed the Pacific on tsunami drift. Nao’s diary is an SOS, a message in a bottle. The girl is abject following her family’s plunge into poverty after her father loses his Silicon Valley job, precipitating a move back to Tokyo. After the move, she is additionally challenged by extreme bullying at her new school and her father’s multiple suicide attempts.
In an interview with Jessica Doyle for Abebooks, Ozeki tells us that after the 2011 tsunami she decided she needed to be the reader of Nao’s diaries, and that if she created a version of herself as a POV character, she must also write her husband, the artist Oliver Kelhammer, into the book. He agreed, and the description of their life on Cortes carries so much verisimilitude that we wonder whether in this section Ozeki is attempting a shishōsetsu or whether she only wishes to draw our attention to this important Japanese genre.
Nao’s life is harsh but she has a fairy godmother—or a great-grandmother, anyway. Jiko Yasutani is an anarchist, a feminist, an ordained Zen Buddhist nun, and, it turns out, a novelist as well. We are a little intimidated, but being a nun mainly means presiding over traditional rituals for the local community and spending days on end fermenting the summer’s daikon harvest. When she is given an old computer by a parish member, she has a new activity: writing cryptic but supportive messages to her traumatized granddaughter in Tokyo.
At some earlier point in her life Jiko also wrote a shishōsetsu. We don’t hear much more about this I-novel, and I wondered whether we weren’t being winked at by Ozeki, who is also a feminist, possibly an anarchist, certainly an ordained Zen Buddhist nun, and a novelist (A Tale is her third). Is Jiko Yasutani an alter ego? Is her life a life Ozeki could be leading in a forest temple on a mountain in Japan? Are these the kinds of question a reader of shishōsetsu is supposed to ask?
Near the end of the novel, Ruth and her husband Oliver discuss whether or not she has actually brought a World War II–era diary from the present to the past, or, perhaps, from one dimension to another. Oliver, more the science head of the two, points out that neither of them has the math skills to really understand quantum theory, and for them, it must remain a poetic kind of game, rife with paradox and hence similar in some ways to the Zen Buddhism which both Ruth-in-the-book and Ruth-in-real-life practice.
In “Shishōsetsu and the Myth of Sincerity,” blogger Jonathan Delacour wonders why he finds the form so fascinating. He too quotes from The Rhetoric of Confession, telling us it uses, as Fowler has it, “the techniques of essay, diary, confession, and other non-fictional forms to present the fiction of a faithfully recorded experience.” Hence, Delacour writes, it “collapses genres that are commonly regarded in the Western tradition as quite separate and exploits the tension between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation.”
Edward Fowler continues:
By far the most common approach to the shishōsetsu has been the nonfictional one, for the general critical perception has been that it is resistant by definition to analysis as an autonomous text. Unlike “pure literature” in the west, which calls to mind an author aloof from his writing after the manner of Flaubert or Joyce, “pure literature” in Japan (a category to which the shishōsetsu belongs) is considered inherently referential in nature: its meaning derives from an extra-literary source, namely, the author’s life. The Japanese as readers of shishōsetsu have tended to regard the author’s life, and not the written work, as the definitive “text” on which critical judgment ultimately rests and to see the work as meaningful only insofar as it illuminates the life.
From Fowler and his interpreter Delacour we learn that shishōsetsu is primarily a naturalistic form and is measured by how closely it mirrors the author’s life. If we do not learn true things about him or her, it’s not a proper specimen; the main reason the genre is read is to gain a window into the author’s personal experience, both exterior in the sense of life events and interior, meaning emotions and thought processes.
Why a novel then? Why not an autobiography? Am I too Western to understand the difference?
Well, for starters, in autobiography a shape-shifting crow doesn’t appear to lead the protagonist on a mystical, dangerous quest to save the second POV character, because such things don’t happen in “real life.” But they shouldn’t happen in shishōsetsu either, since the form expects the author to paint a rigidly realistic picture.
In Japan there is a mythical being, the jishin namazu, or Earthquake Catfish. He punishes human transgressors to his realm by causing earthquakes and is only held in check by a large stone wielded by a minor deity, who pins the kanmae-ishi or stone to the catfish’s head. Following this thread of story, we might surmise that the earthquake which caused the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant happened because the caretaker deity of the shrine had taken a nap or left for a meeting. The meltdown occurred because the stone was understaffed.
The catfish has a relative or alter ego or some such, the way these things go in myth, called the yobaoshi namazu or World Rectifying Catfish. Ozeki tells us that
belief in the world rectifying catfish was especially prevalent during the early nineteenth century, a period characterized by a weak, ineffective government and a powerful business class, as well as extreme and anomalous weather patterns, crop failures, famine, hoarding, urban riots, and mass religious pilgrimages, which often ended in mob violence. The world rectifying catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent, whose rampant practices of price-fixing, hoarding, and graft had led to economic stagnation and political corruption. The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go their assets, which would create jobs in salvage, rubble clearing, and construction.
Which catfish caused the accident, the “jishin namazu” or the “yobaoshi namazu”? Is it true, as a December 2013 Reuters article tells us, that homeless men in Sendai are being “recruited” off the streets by yakuza gangsters and coerced to work for minimum wage, on the largest nuclear cleanup in history?
The World Rectifying Catfish, seemingly, would have something to say about that, as it can hardly be described as an improvement to an already dire situation.
In August 2012, I traveled to Japan with my older sister and my niece, 15 years old, close to Nao’s age. It was over a year after the Fukishima disaster, and we wouldn’t go north of Tokyo, we promised our nearest and dearest, not even to take a quick look around before we headed back south where, allegedly, the fruits and vegetables were still safe to eat. Unfortunately, the numbers depend, as is always the case in these matters, on whose readings you believe, and what their vested interests are.
My niece is one of the many Japanophiles of her generation, having grown up like my own kids watching Ultraman and Sailor Moon and, later on, Neon Genesis Evangelion. She read stacks of manga to the exclusion of much else and eventually pursued this interest into a study of the language. I learned that she knew more than she was giving away when, standing in Tokyo Station one afternoon trying to decipher the way to our bullet train, she removed her ear-buds and said “That way,” calmly pointing to one of the many tentacle-like corridors.
“But how do you know?” I asked. For all I could tell a little map-fairy had whispered the answer in her ear.
“Because it says so.”
“Where does it say so?”
She pointed to one of the countless signs encrusting the overhead beams.
“Right there.”
“You can read kanji?”
My niece nodded. “Some.”
Before we went to Kyoto, we visited the old capital of Kamakura, a town south of Tokyo boasting both a large, hollow Buddha (you can get inside its head) and the important Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū shrine (鶴岡八幡). We visited a man, a friend of my aunt’s, who has been living in Japan for almost 20 years and has learned basic kanji, which encompasses over a thousand characters even though it is the short version taught to children prior to middle school. As with cursive in North America, the longer versions are not taught as much as previously, hence Ruth-in-the-book, Nao and her parents spend a fair bit of time researching the meaning of some of the rarer characters.
A Tale for the Time Being includes footnotes, (some of them in kanji) and as such resembles another of my favorite novels of recent years, Roberto Bolaño’s Los Detectives Salvajes.
As I get older, I find myself lamenting, books that knock my socks off become rarer. We have just read too many books; it is harder to impress us, and so, a little disconsolately, we head back to some “classics,” read or reread a Russian or two, Moby Dick or Middlemarch if we never got around to them. But the contemporary world is reflected by contemporary authors: that, arguably, is what novels are for and what they do best. They do it better than television or film. It’s the way they can get inside things: a character’s head, the time in the world which the characters are inhabiting (the time that the time beings are inhabiting, as Ozeki would have it).
The footnotes in Bolaño’s book tell us wonderful things, such as which characters in Los Detectives Salvajes are stand-ins for which real-life poets in the Mexican infra-realism literary movement, called Visceral Realism in the book. Another thing the novels share (aside from being immersively rich, dense, and layered) is that both boast a main character, also a writer, who is barely distinguishable from the author. In both cases the writer has the same name as the book’s author, although Bolaño’s poet protagonist has a different first name. Bolaño’s trick was also employed by Bret Easton Ellis in Lunar Park, which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2006. As writers we exist, of course, both within and without our work, and blurring and/or exploring this line can be delicious for the author and intriguing for the reader.
Ellis is perhaps most famous as the author of American Psycho, a book I couldn’t actually finish as I didn’t have the stomach for it. Lunar Park, his sixth novel, is about a writer named Bret Easton Ellis, author of the novel American Psycho. Often called a “mock memoir,” it appears to me to be the real Ellis’s way of unpacking the experience of writing American Psycho, and what followed when he became an “overnight success,” much of it unpleasant. Reading it, we definitely feel we are learning something close to the truth about Ellis’s inner life and his outer life as well, but here we are not sure how much. It diverges in several places; for example Ellis-in-the-book has a minor Hollywood actress for a wife. We’re not sure we’ve heard of her, but because Ellis has written about his life as the author of American Psycho with what seems like such relentless soul-baring honesty we assume it is true. The publicists went one step further and created an fan web site for her so that a cursory search would inform the reader that yes, she does exist and is his wife.
The question of where the line between “self-revelation and self-concealment” (as Ozeki calls it) actually lies is addressed in an interview with Ellis on Lunar Park’s web site. Like Ozeki, Ellis decided only partway through the writing to insert himself into the novel as a character, Bret-in-the-book:
Q: We have to start with the most obvious question: the main character in Lunar Park is Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less than Zero, American Psycho, etc. People are going to question just how fictional the novel is. What is your intention? How much of Lunar Park are we to believe is true?
A: My intention? My intention was to write a book that I thought was interesting, meaning there was no intention at all.
The genesis for the book began in 1989 and changed a lot in the ten years before I began writing it. I first wanted to write a book that, I suppose, paid homage to a genre that meant a lot to me growing up (Stephen King was an idol of mine) and which was concerned with a house that was haunted. And it was really that simple.
Bret Ellis was not the main character at that point, though the narrator was a writer and he was married and he did have children. And as I thought about the book—and as my own life became more complicated with age and experience—I realized that the book I had been planning was really about what it meant to be a writer.
Sure, it was a ghost story and there were monsters and demons and I enjoyed playing with the traditional trappings of the genre, but I was also at the stage where the process of writing began to matter to me as material—and I think this happens with most writers.
And that was a big jumping off point and energized me when I was having problems with the outline of the book.
I don’t want to demystify the events that take place and I don’t want to have to clarify which things are autobiographical and which things are less so. But it is, by far, the “truest” book I’ve written, in terms of the majority of events that happened.
It’s up to each reader to decide how much of Lunar Park actually occurred.
Indeed.
The North Pacific gyre is a more or less circular set of currents that course north from Japan in a clockwise fashion across the Pacific to the west coast of North America, south to California and west to Asia again. In the center lies the Hawaiian archipelago, and just northeast of there lies the great Pacific garbage patch—or the eastern one, anyway; there are actually two.
The gyre is important to the plot because it brings things from Japan: low-level radiation from Fukushima (or not, depending on whom you believe); a Hello Kitty lunchbox stuffed full of letters and diaries; and a Japanese crow.
That August my sister, my niece, and I backpacked from Tokyo to Miyajima, staying in hostels and budget hotels— admiring, in proper weeaboo fashion, countless Shinto torii climbing the hillsides in a shadowy pine forest; screeching young women in French maid outfits in the densely neon-coated streets of Akihabara (where the novel opens); herds of miniature deer strolling freely though a village on the sea; crows.
Yes, crows.
Traveling, our senses are drenched each day in the new, and we open, porous, to impression. We are supposed to be interested in Kinkaku-ji, Mishima’s golden temple in Kyoto but it turns out we like Hiroshima more; the tourist guides urge us to explore Ueno Park but we find ourselves standing on a street corner in busy Shinjuku looking at the remarkable crows. “They must be a different species of crow than our crows,” I remarked often, and I turned out to be right. Oliver-in-the-novel tells us the native species in Japan is Corvus japonensis, a subspecies of Corvus macrorhynchos, the large-billed or jungle crow. We learn that the crows:
use wire coat hangers to make nests on utility poles, which short-circuit the lines and cause power outages. Tepco has special crow patrols to hunt them down and dismantle their nests but the crows outsmart them and build dummy nests.... Ladies stopped wearing shiny clips in their hair.
It is important to understand how smart Corvus japonensis is because one particular jungle crow is pivotal to the plot and a major part of what makes this novel magic realist or speculative fiction.
What is the half-life of plastic in the gyre? Oliver discusses the science with the retired anthropologist Muriel, while Ruth’s attention strays to all-encompassing metaphor; the gyre and the Internet are the same, she decides, each is a bearer of memory. An enormous patch of plastic detritus, brightly colored and ground over time small as pixels floats in the Pacific, just as every web page ever made is out there still, drifting in the vast lonely stretches of the Web.
I have never met Ruth Ozeki, but my husband and I knew Oliver-in-real-life well; he is a former student of Doug’s and a fellow artist. When Oliver-in-the-book pontificates on the gyre, the Neo-Eocene forest he’s planting, or the concurrent feeding and electrocution of oysters in a bucket, his personality is established on the page so vividly it is as if we were in the same room together. The Oliver Ruth describes is so precisely the Oliver we remember (just a little older) it’s almost uncanny. Intruding into the descriptions of their life under the dripping trees is the story of the Hello Kitty lunchbox and its contents and Ruth’s dream-time intervention, assisted by a crow, in Nao and her father Haruki’s lives. These fictional characters tell us that while the novel imitates in part the form of shishōsetsu, it is only in part. We can read the novel as a wink to the genre, a kind of sly nod rather than an example. But in the end it also doesn’t matter.
The central metaphor of the book is about time and information. I found the following passage astonishing, describing a warning from 600 years ago that was ignored at enormous cost:
What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. In towns and up and down the coast of Japan, stone markers were found on hillsides, engraved with ancient warnings: do not build your homes below this point.
Profundity almost never works when it’s sought after, but a little farther on, the following (almost throwaway) paragraph jumped out and quietly stunned me. I had missed it the first time around and am glad I gave the book a second read because this passage alone was worth the price of admission.
These images, a miniscule few representing the inconceivable many, eddy and grow old, degrading with each orbit around the gyre, slowly breaking down into razor-sharp fragments and brightly colored shards. Like plastic confetti, they’re drawn into the gyre’s becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. The gyre’s memory is all the stuff we’ve forgotten.
And everyone we used to be, but forgot or turned our backs on; the vids and web pages and LinkedIn accounts that remember us and show up on someone’s search somewhere, sometime, without us ever even knowing.
This is the kind of notion, I told my professor husband, that people who are academics rather than novelists build an entire course or thesis around, eventually publishing a non-fiction book written in abstruse academic language expanding (and expounding) on one idea, usually not nearly as good. It is lucky my husband is an artist first and makes real things in the real world, objects that take up space and humble us and make us think, or he might have been annoyed.
Ursula Pflug lives in Ontario. This essay was funded by the Writers’ Reserve Program of the Ontario Arts Council.
Works Cited
Bolaño, Roberto. The Savage Detectives. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Delacour, Jonathan. “Shishōsetsu and the myth of sincerity.” the heart of things, 22 April 2003. <weblog.delacour.net/archives/2003/04/shishosetsu_and_the_myth_of_sincerity.php>
Doyle, Jessica. “An Interview with Ruth Ozeki.” Abebooks, undated. <www.abebooks.com/books/authors/ruth-ozeki-interview.shtml>
Ellis, Bret Easton. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.
——. “Q&A with Bret Easton Ellis.” Lunar-Park.com, undated. <www.lunar-park.com/interview1.html>
Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. <publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0k400349;brand=ucpress>
Saito, Mary and Antoni Slodkowski. “Japan’s homeless recruited for murky Fukushima clean-up.” Reuters, 30 December 2013. <www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/30/us-fukushima-workers-idUSBRE9BT00520131230>
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