‘Each of Them Thin and Barely Opaque’: Ruth Ozeki’s Truth Approximations

This essay focuses on the work of Japanese American writer Ruth Ozeki (b. 1956). Mainly discussing her novels My Year of Meats (1998) and A Tale for the Time Being (2013), I suggest that, through a sophisticated usage of paratextual, transmedial, and autofictional strategies, Ozeki claims for her work a ‘truth power’ that operates at the dialogical border between the textual world and the real world. Ozeki implements, in my view, a ‘truth search’ in which bare facts can be known, and told, only through the fictive, ‘magical’ power of the imagination; this collaboration between factuality and invention, in turn, makes narrative a performative object that can intervene, and foster practical intervention, in the real world.