Ruth Ozeki created a novel about stoic patience and total Buddhist calmness – a canon-Japanese novel. But you don’t have to be Japanese to understand the motives and feelings of the characters in this book.
14-year-old Naoko endures bullying from her classmates for two years without trying to resist or seek help. Her father is broke, depressed and regularly commits suicide attempts. Her mother somehow copes with reality. Her world consists of poverty, pain, infantile adults who have no strength left to sympathize. And Naoko keeps a diary – about herself, her family and the person who one day finds her diary – that’s how I wrote, that’s how diaries are written, ciphering and coding, hiding them in incredible places, fearing more than anything in the world – and more than anything light wanting to be read. Years later, the American Ruth Ozeki finds this diary in the surf and actually reads it. Thus, a tangle of connections appears: Ruth the writer, who created Naoko, and Naoko, who created Ruth the reader, and again Ruth, who, while reading, seems to re-create Naoko.
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For Ozeki, complex connections are important: between the past and the future, dream and reality, between monks and whores, Asia and America. She exposes them using the metaphors of an ocean current that brings Japanese garbage to American shores, or of neural connections. The connectedness of all phenomena in the world is the opposite of chaos. It is necessary to make one more effort and – to remember the forgotten, to return the stolen, to make out someone else’s handwriting. Where to begin? It is possible in Japanese: one hour a day to sit in the zazen posture. It is possible in a European way: to start a diary. Get in touch with yourself, and then it will definitely be easier. Further – as in a children’s game, where we were killed for fun and we lay face down on the ground, and then … “Hey! There is no death! – jumped up with relief and returned to the game.
Translation from English by Ekaterina Ilyina.
AST, 480 p., 2015.
Japanese-American Ruth Ozeki is a Buddhist priest and linguist. The novel “My Fish Will Live” is the first work by a foreign author in a foreign language that received a literary prize in Russia (Yasnaya Polyana, 2015).