She ran an English school called The Speakeasy near Ginkakuji, which emphasized language learning through theater and movement. She lived in Kyoto 86, She did not study Zen at any Kyoto temple, but was more interested in the Zen arts, including Noh theatre and ikebana.

She graciously gave me some details of her time in Japan. She has received the Women’s Prize for Fiction with her latest book, and previously was awarded the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She has written four novels in which environmental, spiritual, and social themes combine. Her mother was Japanese, but the name Ozeki is a pseudonym. Ruth Ozeki is an American-Canadian author and Zen priest, born in 1956. We all, we members of the material world, have form for a time and then sink back into the ocean. They are what we know as “matter” or the “material world”, and include inanimate objects as well as human beings. In the interview she said that her personal view is that “emptiness” (ku 空) is like an ocean, from which waves or “form” (shiki　色) appear for a time. I wrote to her via her website and asked her permission to write a review for Writers in Kyoto, and she assented, mentioning that she herself used to be a Writer in Kyoto back in the day and is very nostalgic for Kyoto. She is a Zen priest and familiar with the Heart Sutra. It was a surprising serendipity then, to hear Ruth Ozeki herself, in an interview to Guardian Live about her most recent (fourth) novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, saying that the title came from that very phrase. Readers of this website may remember that I wrote a piece called “Insight on a Rainy Day” in August 2022, largely about the Heart Sutra (Hannya Shingyo) and its central message, “Emptiness is none other than form form is none other than emptiness”.

Review the book of form and emptiness