But it stands out among the story’s other sentient entities in that it has extraordinary powers of self-reflection and self-replication. “The Book of Form and Emptiness” is, of course, a book - that is, a thing, upon which Ozeki has naturally conferred sentience. In this book, Ozeki leans heavily on Jorge Luis Borges and Walter Benjamin, whose 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library” deals with the physicality of books.

Both of the novels she has published since being ordained in 2010 - “ A Tale for the Time Being” in 2013, which was a Booker finalist, and her latest, “The Book of Form and Emptiness” - marry Zen parable to postmodernist metafiction. Scissors jump off a desk, aiming to get themselves into the hands of people who might know what to do with them.Ī filmmaker as well as a novelist, Ozeki is also, it’s worth noting, a Zen Buddhist priest. A freezer bag containing a precious diary finds its own way across the Pacific. Crows caw Cassandra-like about imminent danger or snatch an ornament off a character’s head and fly away in a direction that leads that character to her destiny. Everything in her universe, down to a windowpane and a widget, has a psyche and a certain amount of agency and can communicate, if only with the few human beings granted the power to understand them. Adept at magical realist fiction, Ozeki ensouls the world. I mean that she endows objects and animals with anima, the breath of life. I don’t mean that she produces graphic novels or manga or anime, although her work does have the fairy-tale feel of some anime movies. The Japanese American novelist Ruth Ozeki is an animator. THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS By Ruth Ozeki

The book of form and emptiness