AlliterAsian by Allan Cho

themes at the heart of all of Ozeki’s work. In the first two books, the link was through food, the common biological requirement to eat that links continents and cultures.
    In A Tale for the Time Being , the characters are literally connected by the ocean that drops Nao’s diary on Ruth’s island, but they are also metaphorically connected by their own personal tragedies: Nao’sgrief over her former life and Ruth’s loss of her mother to Alzheimer’s disease. But the mechanisms—the gyres—that bring them together aren’t perfect. The connection comes in nearly unidentifiable pieces that require work and care to put together.
    â€œEach of the gyres serves to connect us, but there’s something about the movement of the gyres that breaks down the substances too, so plastic becomes degraded, and so does history and so does memory,” she says.
    â€œThere’s a sense of things breaking down and reconstituting as well through time. This is just another way of talking about impermanence, this idea that nothing stays the same, that things are constantly moving and changing form.”
    To Ozeki, this is the struggle at the heart of our modern global existence. We live in a world where, thanks to the Internet, it’s easy to feel as though we know everything about each other, but the imperfections and omissions in that network often go unnoticed. Rarely is this tension between impermanence and permanence more visible than at the height of a disaster.
    For the first two weeks after the tsunami, Ozeki remembers being glued to the never-ending supply of images of the devastation on the Internet. “And then about two weeks later the attention of the news media moved on and other things were important,” she remembers. “Even though world attention had shifted to the next thing, the situation in Japan was ever more dire. The Internet gyre, the news gyre is very speedy. It cycles very, very quickly.”
    Ozeki acknowledges that remaining open to the movement of global news can be overwhelming. But she also sees it as a powerful tool to construct empathy and build the kinds of connections she writes about—when I speak to her near the end of summer in 2013, she is glued to the events in Cairo.
    â€œWe care about these things now,” she says. “These images have the power to move us and to make us care. That has to be a good thing. For as much as email deprives me of huge swaths of my life, at the same time I’m glad of it.”
    Zen, with its emphasis on empathy and mindfulness, is a way for Ozeki to find peace with that incredible amount of information and the impermanence of life. She became interested in the practice in the 1990s, using meditation as a way to deal with her father’s death.
    In 2001, she met Norman Fischer, a San Francisco practitioner of Soto Zen who would eventually become Ozeki’s teacher. Joining the sect felt like coming home because it was the same one her grandparents had been a part of. In 2010, she was ordained a novice priest.
    Of course, this too appears in A Tale for the Time Being , in the form of Jiko, Nao’s ninety-six-year-old grandmother, a Buddhist nun who lives in a monastery near the coast in Miyagi Prefecture. The scenes at the monastery are some of the most haunting in the book, touched with echoes of Hayao Miyazaki’s classic film Spirited Away .
    As a writer, Ozeki has used Zen to help her move past the usual blockages and struggles of the solitary profession. The practice centres on struggling toward perfection, even as you acknowledge the impossibility of that perfection, a sentiment that is familiar to any novelist.
    â€œThere’s something very beautiful about making an impossible vow,” she says. “In a way, every time you start to write a novel, you have an impossible idea of what this novel will be, and you know that you’ll fail. There’s no question about it.