The Great In-Between

“I’m not half Japanese and half British; I’m wholly both.”

Growing up in Japan and the UK, Duncan Ryuken Williams existed between cultures, languages, and religions, never feeling like he fully belonged anywhere. When he encountered the Buddhist notion of the Middle Path, he felt a sense of relief that these in-between spaces could actually be the grounds for freedom and interconnection.

Ruth Ozeki had a similar experience growing up mixed race: “I always felt pulled in two directions, at home in neither place and always in between.” For Ozeki, a New York Times best-selling author, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, the Middle Path offered a more all-inclusive approach to questions of identity, and in her novels, she uses writing as a way to investigate the nature of suffering and the self.

Recently, Ozeki and Williams spoke with the Reverend Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School (and himself mixed race), to discuss the liberatory power of in-between states, the role of storytelling in alleviating suffering, and the parallels between the four noble truths and the project of literature.

Matthew Ichihashi Potts (MIP): I’d like to start with the question of mixed-race identity. Before I knew you, Ruth, I felt a sense of recognition for your characters. I also know that there’s more going on in your fiction than that shock of recognition—the multiplicity of identity is at stake in a broader and more central way. Could you say something about that?

Ruth Ozeki (RO): Sure, it’s a big topic, and it’s a very Buddhist topic. It took me a long time to understand how to write a novel precisely for this reason [that I was grappling with questions of identity and recognition]. The novels that I grew up reading were usually written by white authors from a Eurocentric position. The Woman Warrior was published when I was in my 20s, and The Joy Luck Club was published when I was in my 30s, so when I was a kid, I didn’t have any reference points.

It took me until I was in my late 30s to write my first novel, My Year of Meats, and I remember starting to write that novel and feeling compelled to have a white protagonist. One of the two protagonists was a documentary filmmaker who was straddling [the cultures of] Japan and the US, and so it just made racial sense for the character to be mixed race. At first, I resisted [making her mixed race] because I thought that everyone would think that she was me. There’s something about the specificity of being mixed race that means that you can’t hide. If a white male author writes a book with a white male protagonist, readers aren’t immediately going to assume that the protagonist is the author. I made that character six feet tall and gave her green hair so that people could tell us apart. [laughs]

The path is enormously wide, and the way that we define things is very narrow. The idea of “normal” is a cultural construct.

MIP: One of the things that I admire about your writing is your willingness to look directly at suffering and to hold it under your gaze. You engage many forms of suffering in your fiction, but the last two novels focus particularly on mental illness. Could you say more about that?

RO: I think there’s such a parallel between the Buddhist teachings and the project of literature. The first noble truth of Buddhism is the truth of suffering. When you think about literature, I challenge you to think of one novel that doesn’t have suffering at its core. I think that the first noble truth of literature is also the truth of suffering, and so the two projects are not as dissimilar as they might seem.

The reason that I write is exactly that: to examine some kind of suffering and really look at it. I find that if I don’t make something into a project, then I tend to ignore it, and so with my last two books I wanted to look back on my own past and understand why I was so unhappy as a young person. I wanted to understand, for instance, why I had all sorts of suicidal thoughts when I was 16. That’s something that I share with my protagonist in A Tale for the Time Being.

Duncan Ryuken Williams (DRW): Let’s go back to the question about mixed-race identity. When I was growing up in Japan, I couldn’t fit in because I didn’t look Japanese enough, but when I went to the UK, I couldn’t fit in there either. I grew up not quite belonging anywhere, feeling in between cultures, languages, and even religions.

When I was thinking about becoming a Buddhist priest, I was struck by the idea of the Middle Path, or the idea that liberation is not found on any one side but in between. That was somehow a way that I didn’t have to choose any one path: I could embrace everything by being in the middle. Being mixed race, I was drawn to that very first question in Dogen’s Genjokoan: Who am I? That investigation led me to the study of Buddhism.

RO: I’m so glad that you brought this up, because growing up, I always felt pulled in two directions, at home in neither place and always in between. The idea that there was a religious tradition that taught the Middle Way came as such a relief—suddenly, there was something that was bigger than the feeling of being neither here nor there, something that was more all-inclusive, to use another phrase from Dogen.

The path is enormously wide, and the way that we define things is very narrow. The idea of “normal” is a cultural construct. It’s a fiction—we made it up. And so since we made up this idea of “normal” to begin with, why can’t we just expand it to make it more all-inclusive, to make it big enough to embrace us all?

This all comes from Genjokoan’s injunction to study the self. It’s such a profound teaching. If I had to cite one teaching as being the lamp for me, that would be it.

MIP: Ruth, how do you think about the relationship between your writing and your religious practice? How do the two complement or build off each other?

RO: In Soto Zen, when you practice meditation, you’re not practicing in order to achieve something. You’re not striving for enlightenment. It’s more that because we are all already enlightened, the zazen that we’re practicing is simply an expression of our original enlightenment. In other words, there’s nothing to “get.” There’s nothing to achieve. You sit zazen because that’s what buddhas do—buddhas sit zazen.

For me, there’s a subtle turning there that relates to writing. When I sit down to write, of course I’d like to finish a book, and then I’d like the book to be published, so there is that kind of [striving toward] outcome. But I don’t focus on that when I’m writing. When I’m writing, I’m just writing. There’s a part of my mind that understands that there’s this other project going on, the project of publication, but I’m not focused on that—I’m focused on following the book as it emerges. There’s a different kind of relationship there.

Zen practice has helped me to let go of that outcome orientation in my writing. Part of that is a kind of faith that once it’s finished, the book will simply be an expression of my dharma position, or my understanding of the dharma at any particular moment, which of course will change. But that’s OK, because that’s the dharma expression then.

DRW: When I was 19, I was thinking of becoming a Buddhist priest. I asked my teacher to ordain, and he just slapped my head and said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go away.” I went back three more times, when I was 20 and 21. The final time, he said, “Do you even know what it means to become a Soto Zen Buddhist priest?” I knew this was a trap question, so I said, “No, I don’t know. Please tell me.” He said, “To be a Buddhist priest means you will have no more holidays, because when everyone else has holidays, that’s the busiest time at the temple. When a temple member is worried about their young child and wants to talk to you, you can’t say, ‘Well, it’s after 5, I won’t talk to you.’” He said that to put a robe on means “How can I help you?”

Our task as Buddhist priests is to alleviate suffering as opposed to increasing it. Could you say more about the role of storytelling in alleviating suffering? That’s another way we can frame what it means to be doing the work of a Buddhist priest and the work of a novelist.

There’s nothing to “get.” There’s nothing to achieve. You sit zazen because that’s what buddhas do—buddhas sit zazen.

RO: The idea of writing a novel that will help rather than hurt is something that I take very seriously. When I’m writing, I’m very much writing for myself. But at some point, you do have to shift over into thinking about publication and understanding that this novel is going to go out in the world. How is it going to be of help rather than hurting people?

It’s true that when you put on a robe, you don’t say no to people. You try to open your arms and be available, and that can be challenging because a novelist’s job is very solitary. In order to write, I need to shut myself off and have vast amounts of unstructured time in order to drop down deep into the novel. And so that is a conflict.

DRW: There’s always a place for deep mountain hermitage.

RO: That’s right, and that’s why I live on a remote island in British Columbia, in an area called Desolation Sound. But I’m also thinking of the Japanese tradition of hijiri, the mountain ascetics and entertainers.

DRW: Right, the hijiri go to the mountains, and then they come down to the towns and do performance arts and storytelling.

RO: That’s me. [laughs] I go to the mountain, and then come down from the mountain and be the entertainer, and then go back to the mountain again. I was so relieved when I learned about the hijiri. I thought, “Yes! Historical precedent.”

This conversation took place on April 12, 2024, for the William Belden Noble Lecture at the Memorial Church of Harvard University. This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.