Writing novels was not something I felt racially, ethnically or culturally entitled to do

If objects could talk, what would they want to tell us? This is the question Ruth Ozeki found herself enthralled by 10 years ago, prompting her to begin writing her latest novel The Book of Form and Emptiness. In this moving and mesmerising tale, the Booker-shortlisted author introduces us to Benny Oh, a 14-year-old boy who starts to hear voices emanating from objects in his home – a broken Christmas-tree ornament, a shoe, a wilting lettuce leaf – after the sudden, tragic death of his father. “Once you start thinking like that, the world turns inside out, and everything becomes a little bit scary and a little bit magical,” Ozeki tells me over Zoom, her easy, magnetic presence transcending the screen.

The Book of Form and Emptiness

The Japanese-American author of A Tale for the Time Being, My Year of Meats and All Over Creation is also a Soto Zen priest, and shares that the idea for her latest work came from a Buddhist riddle that asks: “Do insentient beings speak the dharma?” – “in other words: ‘Do objects understand Buddhist nature?’” Zen philosophy permeates the pages of The Book of Form and Emptiness; in fact, the words ‘form and emptiness’ are lifted from a line in the Heart Sutra. It is unsurprising to hear, then, that Ozeki credits meditation as having helped form her as a writer. “It has really trained me to have faith in the practice of writing, and to keep coming back every day, even if it doesn’t feel good,” she says, adding that rather than planning chapters ahead of time, she allows for “a certain amount of serendipity – that way you’re constantly surprised and always engaged with it.”

When I ask Ozeki what initially led her to writing, the story unravels with a pace as riveting and a narrative as rich as her prose. She was born in Connecticut in 1956 to an American father and Japanese mother, and studied literature first in the US then later in Japan, returning to New York in 1985 where she worked as a film-maker. “I wanted to write novels ever since I knew what a novel was, but it was not something I felt racially, ethnically or culturally entitled to do,” she says. “Haiku, fine, but not the great American novel.” After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, she had ambitions of becoming a Shakespeare scholar – “because that was the literature I loved” – but says that others deterred her from that course. “It was in the late Seventies, and people who looked like me weren’t being encouraged to go into Shakespeare studies.”

Ozeki became familiar with the film business via someone she was seeing at the time, and started working for a low-budget production company. “The director’s field before this had been gay male porn, and so this was his first legitimate film, called Matt Riker: Mutant Hunt,” she explains. “It was very disorganised, and a week before production they realised they had forgotten to hire an art director. They looked around the room and I was the only one not doing anything, and they pointed at me. I had never set foot on a film set before; I had no idea what an art director was. But they told me what to do, and I went on to make a whole series of films with them: Breeders, Necropolis, Robot Holocaust…” she says, laughing, before adding matter-of-factly: “It wasn’t a great fit.” Subsequently, Ozeki landed a job with a Japanese production company, working with the legendary film-maker Akira Kurosawa’s art director on a commercial for Sapporo beer (“Cyndi Lauper was the star, and she was riding around on a pink elephant”), as well as numerous television shows and movies.

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But throughout this time, Ozeki knew she still wanted to write – and it was working in the editing-room that helped pave her way there. “Writing was something I had been trying to do, but I didn’t really know how to do it,” she explains. “Spending days and months turning hundreds of hours of footage into programmes – that’s when I learnt how to tell a story succinctly, to handle a narrative arc.” She received a grant to write a screenplay, and instead wrote her first novel, My Year of Meats, about the media and the politics of the meat industry, which won the 1998 Kiriyama Prize and the American Book Award the same year. “Then I never looked back,” she says.

This was around the same time she adopted the surname “Ozeki” (having originally been called “Lounsbury”) as a way to signpost her Japanese heritage to others when addressing Asian identity issues in her work. “I wanted to make it clear that this was a background that I shared,” she explains.

“I grew up at a time that was different from now. When somebody like me walked into an interview, for example, and they had my CV that said ‘Ruth Diana Lounsbury’, there would be this visible shock. They’d look at my face, they’d look down, then they’d look back up. I got tired of that.” Unconventionally, the name Ozeki belonged to an ex-boyfriend of hers, “but it was a friendly break-up, and I always liked the name”, says the writer, heartily. “It was short, easy to say, and identifiably Japanese.”

In The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ozeki pays tribute to her dual heritage through the protagonist Benny, who, like her, is East Asian and American; and also with references to Shintoism, the indigenous religion of Japan, in which “it is common sense that things are animate and have spirits”. She cites Marie Kondo’s method of thanking your belongings before throwing them away as “pure Shintoism”, giving the example that in Japan, it is tradition not to throw out a needle or pin if it has broken. “You take it to the temple where they have a ceremonial block of tofu, and you put your pin or needle into the tofu so it can have a soft resting place,” she explains. “You do this out of gratitude because that needle has served you for so long.”

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Ozeki began to write the book after the death of her parents, and the process of clearing out their home prompted her to consider the emotional ways in which we get attached to objects. She explores this through the character of Benny’s mother Annabelle, who develops a hoarding problem – causing the voices Benny hears to become increasingly cacophonous. “My parents were raised during the Great Depression, and so they never threw anything out,” she says. There is a scene towards the end of the book where the librarian Cory describes an empty box that her grandmother had, labelled “empty box”. “She can’t put anything in it because if she does then it becomes what it’s not – it has to remain an empty box,” says Ozeki, recalling fondly that she found this exact box in her mother’s possessions, “labelled in both Japanese and English, just in case”.

When I tell Ozeki that The Book of Form and Emptiness reminded me of navigating the world as a child, anthropomorphising inanimate toys and perceiving every object with hyper-awareness, her eyes lights up. “I remember that feeling too, of being little and feeling that everything was vibrant,” says Ozeki. “Everything has volition, everything has desires and needs. I wanted to capture that.” Undoubtedly, in doing so, Ozeki makes her spectacular book itself come alive.

Ruth Ozeki’s top 5 reads by ESEA authors

1/ Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

“Quirky, poignant, deadpan and quietly profound, Convenience Store Woman is one of my favourite recent novels from Japan. It’s a gift to anyone who has ever felt at odds with the world – and if we’re being honest, that would be most of us.”

Convenience Store Woman: Sayaka Murata

2/ Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

“A quiet, powerful story, told from the point of view of a homeless ghost. As a Zainichi Korean (South Korean citizen, born in Japan), Miri observes Japan with a clear, precise outsider’s eye.”

Tokyo Ueno Station

3/ Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

“Mieko Kawakami is one of several exceptionally talented young Japanese women writers who are redefining the Japanese literary fiction, particularly as in English translation. She writes unflinchingly about the female body, about what it is to be a woman in contemporary Japan.”

Breasts and Eggs

4/ The Vegetarian by Han Kang

“Han Kang is a South Korean writer who won the Man Booker International Prize, along with her translator Deborah Smith, for this remarkable novel about a Korean woman who stops eating meat and becomes estranged from her family and her world. Like Kawakami, Han explores themes of body, violence, family, feminism and mental illness.”

The Vegetarian

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5/ Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

“I'm cheating a little here, because I haven’t yet read Interior Chinatown, but I've heard such wildly enthusiastic reviews of this darkly humorous, skewering, and yet big-hearted novel from friends that I felt compelled to include it. Yu, a screenwriter for ground-breaking TV shows like Westworld, tells the story of a young bit-part actor Willis Wu, who is trying to navigate the Asian male stereotyping and make it in Hollywood. It’s at the top of my ‘to-read’ pile, and I can't wait!”

Interior Chinatown

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‘The Book of Form and Emptiness’ by Ruth Ozeki is available to buy now. SHOP NOW

From 4 October, Ozeki will be hosting a week of events in the UK. For more information, visit www.ruthozeki.com.

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