I want to tell you about an interesting book, which came into my hands thanks to our book club "Bookaholics Anonymous". We read it at the end of last year, the discussion was interesting, but I only have time to write about it now.
The book has two narrative lines and two female characters, separated not only by distance, but also by timelines. One of them lives here and now, and we learn about the life of the other from the pages of a diary from the past, brought from Japan by the ocean waves to the Canadian shore of Vancouver Island.
Ruth Ozeki (born in New Haven, Connecticut) is a Japanese American novelist. She is the daughter of anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury. Ozeki published her debut novel, My Year of Meats, in 1998. She followed up with All Over Creation in 2003. Her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was published on March 12, 2013. She is married to Canadian land artist Oliver Kellhammer, and the couple divides their time between New York City and Vancouver.
This story begins with a rather frank address by the girl Nao in her diary to whoever finds and reads it after her death. She reflects on herself and her life from the perspective of a temporary being who comes into this world only for a certain time and then leaves it, counting the days until the end of her life and her time in this world. In the pages of her diary, she confesses her desire to commit suicide and details how and why she came to that decision. But she shares not only the painful moments of her life, she weaves into her story and the story of her very old great-grandmother - a Buddhist nun and her uncle, who was drafted into the Japanese army during the war as a kamikaze pilot. These stories are a kind of clues to what is going on, they help us understand the difference between the European and Japanese way of thinking, they help show the connection between the past and the present within the same family, showing how the actions of ancestors in the past can affect the lives of generations of the present.
We do not know how much time has passed since the girl Nao wrote her lines about her wish to die, nor do we know her fate today, when the schoolgirl's diary, having traveled a great distance, is found by a writer named Ruth, an American with Japanese roots. Flipping through the pages of the diary, she learns about the difficult life and difficult experiences of the girl Nao, who in one fell swoop of all the misfortunes at once: poverty, forced return from America to Japan, bullying and taunting at school, and the problems of her parents, who barely cope with the difficulties of life. Gradually, Ruth becomes more and more immersed in someone else's life, pushing her own life and her family problems to the background. The more she gets to know Nao, the more she becomes infused with her story and becomes attached to the girl, wanting to influence her choice and prevent her planned suicide, completely forgetting that "Here" and "Now" are completely different concepts for them, since the drifting packet hit the ocean years ago.
Ruth Ozeki's book came out deep and multi-layered, and all of these layers are very harmoniously intertwined with each other. The first layer - the personality and life of the writer Ruth Ozeki herself, transferred to his own novel, mainly in the form of a sad writer in a creative crisis, living with her husband on a small secluded island that looks like a very rainy garden of Eden. In addition, some facts of Ruth Ozeki's real life are reflected in other characters or events of the work. I was interested in this issue and drew such parallels between the elderly nun Jiko-san and the fact that Ozeki is a Buddhist priest, between Nao's trip to her great-grandmother for summer vacation and Ruth Ozeki's trip to her grandmother in Japan, about Ozeki's own floristry hobby and the character Oliver's work on the island (Ruth Ozeki's husband is also called Oliver by the way).
The second layer is about the life of a teenage girl, Nao, who faces different sides of life: the well-off life of a fairly ordinary teenager in the States and the life of an outcast on the margins of society in Japan. The author was able to perfectly convey through the young girl and her family the difference in Japanese and European culture and perception of many aspects of life, literally giving the reader the opportunity to see the country from the inside, as an outsider in it. In general, Ruth Ozeki did a very good job of revealing the age-old concept of "an insider among outsiders, an outsider among insiders," which Nao felt for herself in every way. It is difficult to be born or live in a foreign country, considering it one's own, to be brought up in this different culture, and then suddenly find yourself in your own country among your own people, but to remain forever a foreigner and an outsider to them.
The third layer is the story of the 104-year-old nun Jiko, who lives in seclusion in the mountains. I really liked this character, I wanted to learn as much as possible about her life and listen to her stories. It is because of this character that the book is filled with philosophical reflections on life, on the perception of time, on finding yourself and your inner superpower, on finding your way in this world and on the perception of the people around you.
The next layer is the story of a young boy, Haruka #1, who was Naoko's great-uncle. He was a dreamy and kind student, fond of literature and philosophy, but his life fell apart the moment he was drafted into the army during World War II. He was forced to serve his country on a mission as a kamikaze pilot. It was hard to read the mind of a man who knew what fate awaited him. But despite all this horror, he lost neither clarity of thought nor purity of soul and remained whole in the ugly and senseless nightmare.
And another layer, which tells the story of Haruka #2, Naoko's father. This character came out the most ambiguous and, at first glance, very unpleasant. Initially one only wants to condemn this man, because his behavior seems unbearable and unforgivable. In general I could not understand how it is possible to accept his failure so calmly and put his hands down, completely forgetting about his family. However, my attitude toward him began to change as the individual facts began to emerge and paint the big picture, turning everything upside down.
All these human destinies are woven into a single whole, and the boundary between past and future is gradually erased, because time here is the ocean, and like in any ocean, the waters of time do not limit a person, he can easily get from present to past, and then immediately to the distant future.
I can say right away that "My Fish" was slow and rather difficult to read, and the impression at the beginning was very ambiguous. On the one hand, it had a good idea and interesting artistic tricks of the author, several narrative lines that intertwine in the past and present and are narrated by two different characters. On the other hand, I caught myself many times that in some places it felt frankly overextended and overloaded with thoughts that try to cover too many different topics and problems. That's not a bad thing at all, you just have to be prepared for the book to take longer to read than it might seem at first glance. I was also a little surprised by the unevenness of the two narrative lines - Ruth's story seriously loses out to Nao's story. Maybe it's just my perception, but reading about Ruth's life was not that interesting to me and her personality seemed very faded in comparison to the other characters. Perhaps that's what the author intended, to make Ruth just a rebroadcast, focusing all the attention on the story of Nao and her family.
But, those controversial points aside, the further I read, the more I got drawn in and the more I liked her. And the reason I liked it in the first place was because it gave the reader a huge amount of space for reflection and reasoning. Here one finds thoughts about life and death, about finding one's place in this world, about the power of the spirit that can heal even deep wounds, about conscience and the price one sometimes pays for one's convictions, and about much else, including even quantum theory and discussions of the ambiguity of time.
For easy reading and relaxation this book is unlikely to suit, but if read in measured therapeutic doses, it will be read with interest and will not have time to scare neither enough specific details of life in Japanese society, nor to blow your brains out with philosophical arguments. The book sets you up for unhurried reading and contemplation of the events described with their minimal dynamics, it requires thoughtful reading and digging in the numerous plot details and nuances with multiple reconsideration of everything that is happening.
This article was sponsored by Mitra Khobbakht
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