Ruth Ozeki Books in Order

Ruth Ozeki was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, the daughter of a Japanese mother and a white American father. That mixed background, and the questions it raised about language, belonging, family, and identity, runs quietly through much of her work.

She studied English literature and Asian studies at Smith College, graduating in 1980. A Japanese Ministry of Education fellowship then took her to Japan for graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara Women’s University.

Her years in Japan were busy and unusual. Ozeki studied Noh drama and mask carving, founded a language school, and taught at Kyoto Sangyo University. She later returned to New York and found her way into film, first working in art direction and production design, then directing documentary programs for Japanese television.

Film came before fiction.

Her documentaries include Body of Correspondence and Halving the Bones, a personal film about taking her grandmother’s remains back to Japan. The work taught her how to shape real lives, images, research, and big public questions into a story. Those skills carried into her novels.

Ozeki’s first novel, My Year of Meats, follows a Japanese American filmmaker making a TV program meant to sell American meat in Japan. It looks at food marketing, fertility, marriage, and the cost of pretending nothing is wrong. In All Over Creation, a reluctant daughter returns to her Idaho farming hometown just as a fight over genetically engineered potatoes gathers force. Both books mix family trouble with questions about who controls what people eat.

Her later novels stretch further in form while staying close to ordinary people under pressure. A Tale for the Time Being connects a bullied Japanese teenager’s diary with a writer on a British Columbia island who finds it washed ashore. The Book of Form and Emptiness follows a grieving boy who hears objects speak and seeks calm in a library. Readers often come to Ozeki for stories that make room for humor, sorrow, curiosity, Buddhism, science, environmental worries, and the strange ways people try to care for one another.

She also wrote The Face: A Time Code, a memoir built around three hours spent looking into a mirror. It turns that simple setup into a clear-eyed look at aging, race, ancestors, the body, and the stories a face can hold.

Buddhist practice is part of Ozeki’s daily life as well as her writing life. A longtime meditator, she was ordained as a Soto Zen priest in 2010 and is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation.

Ozeki is professor emerita of English language and literature at Smith College, where she taught creative writing and held the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professorship of Humanities. She and her husband, environmental artist Oliver Kellhammer, divide their time among Western Massachusetts, New York City, and British Columbia.