“A Universe of Many Worlds”: An Interview with Ruth Ozeki

“A Universe of Many Worlds”: An Interview with Ruth Ozeki

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Issue 3 (September 2013)
pages 160-171
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt028

Eleanor Ty, Professor of English and Film Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

That’s what it felt like when I was growing up, like I was a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes.—Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation (4)

Is death even possible in a universe of many worlds? —Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (400)

Immigrant and ethnic writing frequently addresses the dilemma of being caught between two worlds. More often than not, the protagonists in these works are torn between the desire to assimilate into American culture while negotiating with the original culture of their parents and the realization that their ethnic, racial, or religious difference is what makes them special as hyphenated subjects. For Ruth Ozeki, filmmaker and internationally acclaimed author of My Year of Meats (1998), being in between two cultures becomes a source of inspiration and strength. As the daughter of a Japanese mother and an American father, she feels that being outside of the mainstream can be an advantage. In an interview with Barbara Palmer, Ozeki said, outside “is the only place for a writer to be. Otherwise, you lose your perspective, your edge. You stop seeing things.”

In both My Year of Meats and her second novel, All Over Creation (2003), the protagonists are mixed-race Japanese Americans who do not quite fit the image of the “attractive, appetizing, and all-American” ideal woman represented in popular media (My 8). Jane Takagi-Little of My Year of Meats tries to explode this nostalgic “illusion of America” (9) by deliberately focusing on nonwhite, non-heterosexual, and nontraditional families when she gets a chance to direct a television show called My American Wife! for a Japanese audience. In All Over Creation, Yummy Fuller, who always had to play “Indian princess” in Liberty Falls Elementary School when she was growing up (7), runs away from her farming family…

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