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Ruth Ozeki. Image: Danielle Tait
The Book of Form and Emptiness (Text Publishing) is not only American–Canadian author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki’s fifth book—and at 560 pages, her longest work to date—but the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It’s simultaneously a sprawling and self-contained story about teenager Benny grappling with the death of his father Kenji. Benny starts hearing a cacophony of voices emanating from the objects around him, while his mother Annabelle inversely copes by filling every inch of their small home with material possessions. Along the way, Benny meets The Aleph, an enigmatic girl who leads him on adventures revolving around their public library, and the Bottleman, a famous Slovenian poet who teaches him about the power of stories.
Sonia Nair spoke to Ruth Ozeki from her home in Massachusetts.
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This book is about our relationship with objects and so much more—grief, trauma, addiction and family. But I wanted to start with music, because you have such a lyrical and playful way of writing about it. I was struck by this line that describes Kenji meeting Annabelle, which I really loved: ‘He closed his eyes, raised his clarinet, and blew a sinuous line of notes that rose like a rope, twining through the trumpets and up around the bass, subduing the snare drum and looping past the sax, until finally it reached her.’ What role does music play in your own life?
Oh, wow, I’m so glad you started with that. One of the joys for me in writing is bringing music into the text somehow. And I’ve done that in every single book. When I’m writing, I tend to start assembling a playlist. The playlist is a way of helping me get in the mood and find the aura of the book. Benny Goodman did this amazing, historic concert that he played in Carnegie Hall, the rare recording of which was lost for years, decades. And then it was discovered again and reprinted. Learning about that concert, listening to the music and having that running through my head as I was writing The Book of Form and Emptiness was a huge source of pleasure. But there are so many different moods that you have to tap into, writing a long novel. And so, each of the different characters have themes that I associate with them. In any case, I assembled quite a long playlist and it’s up on Spotify. I like to release it publicly. It’s a lot of fun to do that.
When I was a child, I studied the piano and I played flute. I was pretty serious about it as a young person. But it was really in high school that I realised I was never going to be the musician that I’d hoped to be. But I’ve always listened to music and I’ve always written to music as well. The music that I write to is, as I said, very specific.
Annabelle and Benny are such delightful characters, who are so inscrutable to one another, but who we, as readers, get to see in all their fears, doubts and joys. How did these two characters come to you, and what was important to you in trying to render them as fully formed people?
That’s the main challenge and the main job of the novelist—to find these characters. And, you know, where they come from is such a mystery. Obviously, on some level, they come from me—from some dark part of my psyche that I’m not particularly even aware of. They form and rise into consciousness somehow. But I usually experience characters as voices first. Young characters, especially, have come with very, very clear voices. And then once I start to hear the voices, the characters reveal themselves quite quickly and always in surprising detail. I’m always amazed at what characters decide to do.
‘I usually experience characters as voices first. And then once I start to hear the voices, the characters reveal themselves quite quickly and always in surprising detail. I’m always amazed at what characters decide to do.’
When I started writing this book, it was in a third-person, super omniscient, almost godlike voice. And, you know, it was moving along just fine. And then about 50 pages in, Benny suddenly interrupted the narration and started objecting to the way the narrator was telling the story—Benny and the narrator started to have a conversation. And that’s when I realised, for the first time, that the narrator was actually a character.
And it was the book itself that was doing the talking. So, The Book of Form and Emptiness is being narrated by The Book of Form and Emptiness, and is having this dialogue with Benny.
The way Benny looks at objects—this act of bestowing feelings, desires, aspirations on to objects reminds me of how I was as a child. I used to create a little family out of my colour pencils. And I think, in a way, this act comes naturally to children. Is that why Benny is our standpoint into this story?
Yes, I think that’s right. When you look at any animation, it’s exactly this. It’s giving life, volition, joy, emotions, desires and ambition to inanimate objects and bringing them to life. And I think that is exactly what you’re talking about. It’s something that children do naturally. It’s play. And so Benny hears the voices of objects speaking to him, and he’s too old for that—he’s at an age where that’s no longer appropriate behaviour. And so, of course, it’s immediately diagnosed as being an illness, a problem.
But I think children have a much more fluid relationship with the world around them and perceive the world in very different ways. Benny’s a very, very sensitive child who has been shocked and traumatised by the death of his father. And so, it made sense to me that his senses would be very open and very easily stimulated.
This happened to me after my own dad died. I had this experience for about a year after his death where I would hear his voice—not in the way that I hear the voices of fictional characters speaking to me, which is more internal. But my dad’s voice, I heard it very much with my ears, as if he were standing outside of me. He was always standing sort of behind me, slightly to the right. And he would clear his throat (he had a very distinctive way of clearing his throat), and he would say my name, and this would happen very quickly. And every time it happened, I would turn around and expect to see him. And then of course, he wouldn’t be there, and I’d feel this punch of grief again. And this maybe happened five or six times over about a year or so. It happened 25 years ago, and I’d completely forgotten about it until I started writing the character of Benny.
And since this book has come out, you’ve encountered people who have heard voices in similar ways, haven’t you? Was a key part of this book to non-pathologise this act of hearing voices, unlike how Benny is treated in the book?
Yes, exactly. I think that for so many reasons, the psychiatric diagnostics now have become more and more, in a way, rigid and defined. When I was growing up, and some people would say this is a good thing, it wasn’t like that. I had a lot of mental health challenges when I was in high school and had what, at that time, we called a nervous breakdown. I was hospitalised. So, a lot of the experiences that Benny had in the psychiatric ward were based loosely on the kinds of experiences that I had had when I was 16–17 years old.
But I was never diagnosed with anything, you know, and it never became something that stayed with me all my life. I mean, I’ve always struggled with anxiety and depression, but, you know, what writer hasn’t? I think it just comes along with the territory.
What I’ve discovered after writing the book is that there are a lot of people who have this experience of hearing voices. I told you the story about my dad’s voice and the characters speaking to me. And I also have those terrible internal voices, you know—the neurotic inner critic voice that we all have.
Benny’s inner critic voice was particularly violent, but it was incredibly relatable.
Yeah. I think that anybody, any writer, has this experience; of these internal voices that are telling you to stop doing what you’re trying to do. But in any case, I’m very aware that these voices that I hear, for some reason, fall into a bandwidth that society pretty much calls normal. And I was thinking about this, you know, what makes something normal and what makes something pathological? We have this category, and then anything that’s outside of that category is othered and we exclude it, we pathologise it, we medicate it. My feeling is that sometimes these kinds of diagnostics can be very helpful if a person is suffering, but they can also be very harmful.
I’ve met so many people who’ve been subjected to the kinds of treatment that Benny’s subjected to in the book and have really suffered as a result of that which is supposed to be treating them. And there are all sorts of modalities now that are available for people who want a different kind of support. That’s what I’ve been interested in. And that’s what I think ultimately helps Benny and his mom too.
It’s very tough to live in a country that does not have a public medical system. I’m also a Canadian citizen, and it’s always shocking to come back to the US and realise that we’re all so bound to our jobs, because our ability to go to a doctor is basically tied to our employment, which is insane.
So much of this book is about the limitations of language. What is the role of language in this novel?
The role of language in this book was very, very interesting, because the narrator of the book is the book, right? I had the book speak in first person, but every time I wrote the first person ‘I’, it just felt wrong that the book would identify itself as a singular speaker, a singular character. And then I realised, oh, right, of course—books are more of a network consciousness, a hive mind. The book would never really refer to itself in the singular; it would always be the plural ‘we’. And so, on one level, that was a linguistic problem that took me quite a long time to solve.
‘It’s so much fun dipping into the subjectivities of these different characters, knowing that it was the book who was doing that. This is what makes writing so wonderful.’
But the other thing too is that because it’s a fictional book doing the narrating in an omniscient voice, it has the ability to move inside the heads of characters. Annabelle is somebody who worries a lot—she perseverates, and her mind works in loops. When the book is narrating Annabelle’s scenes, the book is channelling her idiom.
That was really fun for me because it was a way of dipping into the subjectivities of these different characters, knowing that it was the book who was doing that. This is what makes writing so wonderful. It’s so much fun to do because there’s just so many different levels of diction, levels of discourse that one has to be aware of.
It’s fascinating. We see how Annabelle views Benny, which is as a monosyllabic teenage boy, but through the book, we access his inner turmoil.
Exactly. I’m fascinated by the way that parents and children misunderstand each other. My parents were 42 when they had me, and it never really occurred to me that they had whole lives before I was born. They had lives and they had trauma, but because the subjective reality of their experience was not something that I was privy to, it wasn’t real to me. As a result, I really misunderstood them.
And when we talk about Annabelle, it’s very important to talk about her trusty companion, Tidy Magic, which seems very much like a cheeky stand-in for Marie Kondo, which I loved. I know in your past books, you’ve married Zen philosophies with multilayered narratives, but I was wondering what it was like to write this book in the aftermath of Marie Kondo, KonMari and these ideas around how we should treat our objects becoming mainstream in a way.
When Marie Kondo burst onto the scene and started her global domination and march through our homes, I thought it was wonderful. I was fascinated and pleased because what she was doing was introducing a very kind of Japanese sensibility to Westerners, to the whole world. And people were loving it, you know, people were really into it. This idea that we have these objects and that we have these intense relationships with our objects seems really clear to me. It’s something that goes back to when we were children—we have these very, very intense relationships with our favourite blanket or teddy bear or whatever it happens to be. But that never really goes away. I think most people continue to have favourite objects. And so what is that relationship? What is it that makes one pen so much better than another pen? So that was something that I wanted to explore.
In Buddhism, we treat objects and physical surroundings very carefully. And there’s a lot of cleaning that goes on. You take care of the things in the temple, the things in the monastery. But Marie Kondo’s background is Shinto. Shinto is the native Japanese, Indigenous Japanese religion, and it’s an animist tradition. And so, it’s kind of common knowledge in Japan that things have spirits. You see shrines built to honour trees, but manufactured items too are thought to have spirits. And so when Marie Kondo says, ‘don’t just throw away a pair of socks that have worn themselves out taking care of your feet; take a moment to hold them, and feel a little bit of gratitude first, and then throw them away’—there’s nothing wrong with doing that. It’s a very beautiful thing. People might think it’s silly, but it makes a lot of sense.
‘I’m fascinated by the way that parents and children misunderstand each other. My parents had whole lives before I was born, but because it was not something I was privy to, it wasn’t real to me.’
I think if we all honoured our objects with more of that spirit, we wouldn’t have a culture of disposability the way we do and the planet would be in better shape environmentally, too. Because, of course, planned obsolescence is one of the problems. It’s a design feature in most manufactured objects, right? Most of the things that we buy are designed to fall apart so that we have to buy more. And that’s a strain on the environment. So I think that this way of treating objects with more respect is probably a good thing for us to cultivate.
One of the sentiments I thought was really interesting in the book is when The Aleph says, ‘Maybe it’s time for artists to get out of the studio and move into the streets. I want to focus more on unmaking. On direct action. On interventions.’ And this is a very big question, but I wanted to ask you what you think the role of art and books are in this climate changed world? And if you share her sentiments?
Well, it’s such a big topic. I have many friends who are artists, and my husband is an artist. And this is a question that comes up a lot: what is the role of art in a world that is so beleaguered environmentally? Is there a justification for making more stuff? Is there a justification for using plastic, for example, to make art that criticises plastic? I think any time you’re dealing with material substance, you really have to ask these kinds of questions. But if we’re artists, and we don’t make things, then what do we do? There’s different kinds of ways that people answer that. My husband does a lot of work with environmental art, rehabilitating rural landscapes or ruined landscapes and turning them into places where people can congregate and make things right. The project continues, even though he’s not there. So it’s this kind of social practice that the character The Aleph is interested in.
And I’m very interested in it too because I think what art does best is encourage us to form relationships, to talk to each other, to be in dialogue with each other. And, to my mind, that’s what novels are; they’re collaborations between the writer and the reader. We think of The Book of Form and Emptiness as a singular thing, a singular object. But I don’t really think of it that way; I think of it more as a kind of distributed experience. The book goes out into the world, and readers read it, and they bring their lived experience right to the page. And then together, I and the reader are creating a novel that is literally novel, right? It is novel to me, and to that reader. Now, of course, I don’t necessarily know those readers and that’s kind of cool too.
‘It’s sort of like a multiverse…there are as many different Books of Form and Emptiness as there are readers who take the time to read it. That seems pretty magical to me.’
So in a way, it’s a sort of like a multiverse; there are as many different Books of Form and Emptiness as there are readers who take the time to read it—because we’re all constructing something that’s slightly different from everyone else. That’s a dialogue and a conversation that happens. And to my mind, that’s the real magic of writing. And the magic of art is to be in relation to people, even if you don’t know the people who are your collaborators. That seems pretty magical to me.
I love that. Like, the Everything Everywhere All At Once of books.
That’s right. I mean, very often, readers will tell me about a passage that I’ve supposedly written, and I’m just scratching my head thinking, ‘wait, I actually don’t remember writing that’. Sometimes I forget, but most of the time, it’s because the reader has read something very meaningful to them into the story that that I told. And so we’ve created something completely unique. And I love that, I think that’s really nice.
What was it like constructing such a multilayered, big book?
I was working on it certainly since 2013; maybe it was even 2012. It took about eight years to write. I think the reason why there’s so many fat books out right now is because of the pandemic; we were all stuck inside, and what were we going to do except write?
I think the seeds are always planted before, but it’s a mystery to me how the different elements come together, how they start to constellate and how from this constellation, the idea for the book is born. In The Book of Form and Emptiness, I knew that I was going to be writing about objects. I was trying to think about what objects I should put in the book, and I looked around but wasn’t terribly inspired. And then I decided that if somebody told me about an object that sparked my interest, I would put it in the book and allow the object to determine what happened next in the book.
‘The job of an author is very, very different from the job of a writer. The writer who wrote The Book of Form and Emptiness doesn’t really exist anymore, right?’
There’s an element of serendipity and randomness, of just trying to be open to what comes into my life and putting it into the book and seeing where it goes. Sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t work, and then you take it out again, but even when you take it out, it leaves a little bit of a palimpsest or a little bit of a residue. Which I think the reader feels even if it’s not overtly there; there’s just the shadow of an influence somehow. It’s a process of discovery.
My last question is about success and what it means to you. So recently, The Book of Form and Emptiness won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Congratulations!
Thank you so much.
You’re no stranger to success—you’ve been shortlisted for the Booker and multiple other prizes. Your books have been translated into so many languages. I was wondering what your relationship is to these accolades, and whether they influence your writing process at all.
I tend to forget about things pretty quickly. I don’t really hold on to it. And I think it’s because I have a very strong negative bias—I tend to worry about things that are going wrong, and forget about anything good that’s ever happened to me. I think it’s kind of a healthy thing—I mean, that’s just the way I am; I can’t imagine being any other way. I don’t read reviews and I have a very minimal social media presence because I don’t think it helps me to have other people’s voices and opinions, whether they’re good or bad, in my head. It’s too much pressure to be worrying about people’s opinions when you’re still in the process of writing. I try to shut as much of that out as I possibly can. Which is why it’s hard.
Once a book is published, it takes me a little while to transition from being an author to being a writer again. The job of an author is very, very different from the job of a writer. The writer is the one who writes, so the writer who wrote The Book of Form and Emptiness doesn’t really exist anymore, right? That was then, and the person you’re talking to now is the author. And at some point, the author will be able to retire from this particular book, and hopefully become a writer again. In my mind, I keep those two roles pretty separate.
The Book of Form and Emptiness is available now from your local independent bookseller.
