When reviewing A Tale, Julia Denholm has observed that “[w]ith the post-earthquake, post-tsunami effects still being so strongly felt on the west coast [of North America in 2014], the book seemed very appropriate.” What makes Ozeki’s novel an “appropriate” text to read in times of ongoing disaster, however, is not only its explicit references to Japan’s
earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, and their transpacific consequences. As other reviewers such as David L. Ulin pointed out, “what’s compelling about A Tale for the Time Being . . . is that it uses . . . uncertainty to push below surface, to make a series of unexpected links.” In other words, “Ozeki wants us to think about the boundary . . . between what we know and what we project.” In her posthumanist reading of A Tale, Michelle N. Huang echoes some of Ulin’s observations about the “unexpected links” that Ozeki makes to complicate what we “know” and “project.” Drawing attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that A Tale represents, Huang seeks to examine “Asian American racial formation in unexpected locations and contexts, ones thought of as peripheral to the field of Asian American studies” (96). Among the scenes in A Tale that Huang calls attention to is one where the Pacific Ocean “interrupt[s]” the shore of Whaletown on Cortes Island, allowing Nao’s lunchbox to reach Ruth (101). While initially appearing as “someone’s garbage” that is not unlike the list of worthless objects—“fishing lines, floats, beer cans, plastic toys,
tampons, Nike sneakers” and even “severed feet”—tossed back and forth by waves, Nao’s lunchbox demands Ruth’s attention as it not only brings to the fore the destructiveness of Japan’s 3.11 disasters whose effects were felt through the Pacific; more importantly, it also helps draw attention to the “jettisoned histories of disregard and violent erasure” (99) that constituted part of the past of Ruth’s community. One prominent example of such resurfacing of “jettisoned histories” can be taken from the naming of “Jap Ranch,” an old homestead nearby the place where Nao’s lunchbox washed ashore. As Huang observes, with its
nickname which signifies American aggression and hostility towards Japanese, “Jap Ranch”
serves as reminder of “the violence and trauma of Japanese American incarceration during World War II” which should not be forgotten in our putatively “postrace” society (100). For Huang, a critical focus on the garbage and oceanic interruptions represented in A Tale
reaffirms “the importance of reading for race in deracinated locales” (101), a task that should remain central to the field of Asian American studies.
In a similar vein, Guy Beauregard has advanced a reading of A Tale that foregrounds some of the epistemological challenges that Ozeki poses to her readers, namely, “the limits of which lives various readers of this text can presume to know” (105). As Beauregard contends, these limits are manifested through the supposedly “remote” sites of dispossession that Ozeki represents—both briefly and at length. One explicit example can be drawn from the scene that Huang has also placed critical emphasis on: when the racialized history of “Jap Ranch” is discussed among the novel’s characters. Beauregard observes that “[b]y evoking the state-directed dispossession of racialized subjects on Cortes Island (in this case, an unnamed
‘Japanese family’) who were forcibly relocated and forced to sell their home, this [scene]
points our attention to figures who are no longer present in [Ruth’s] community” (101).
While Ozeki’s readers are able to trace the disappearance of the “subjects racialized as Japanese” from Cortes Island thanks to Ruth’s “stubborn refusal” to let these lives disappear (101), there are other moments of dispossession in A Tale that are less easy to know.
Encapsulated in a scene that depicts the confrontation of two characters—a marine biologist and environmental activist called Callie, and a former WWII bomber pilot who was stationed at an airbase in the Aleutians and who once used whales for target practice—these lesser known moments include human ecological violence against whales, figures that are no longer present in the European settlement of Whaletown, as well as the forced removal of
Indigenous Aleut people from their ancestral home, the Aleutian Islands, by the Japanese and American governments for military purposes (102). Significantly, these stories of
dispossession pose challenges to readers who presume to know which lives Ozeki’s novel has
represented, a challenge that, as Beauregard, following Gayatri Spivak, argues, can potentially “change how we construct objects for knowing” (108).
In addition to Beauregard’s site-specific investigation of the representation of lesser known or difficult histories of dispossession in A Tale, Chih-ming Wang has offered insightful observations about the novel, which he calls “a great text for thinking about
transpacific asymmetries.”20 As Wang observes, A Tale “exemplifies how literature functions as what David Palumbo-Liu calls ‘delivery system’ to engender ‘a space for imagining our relation to others and thinking through why and how that relation exists,’ which in turn could create ‘new forms of narration and representation.’” Further elaborating on the way A Tale can function as a “delivery system,” Wang contends that “by delivering otherness (Japan) as relatable to (Asian) American readers,” Ozeki’s novel “demonstrates how Asian Americans begin to find new meanings and knowledge in their ties to Asia, and thus projects Asia as a parallel universe which is coeval with, related to, yet also detached from, North America.”
The relationships or ties between Japan and America that A Tale represents are not, however, necessarily equal or symmetrical; their asymmetries, according to Wang, are manifested through the way Nao’s diary is incorporated into an “immigrant narration” within an “Asian North America frame.”
Washed ashore on Cortes Island and eventually picked up by Ruth, Nao’s diary does not only reveal stories related to Japan. As Wang observes, it also “offers an entry point to access [a] larger transpacific history.” The transpacific histories that Nao’s diary brings to the fore include World War II and 9/11, whose violence loomed large in the lives of the two Harukis—Nao’s great uncle, a kamikaze pilot who detested and resisted the imperialist ideologies and commands of Imperial Japan; and Nao’s father, a computer programmer who lost his job in Silicon Valley because of his insistence on installing a conscience-triggering interface in the war games that were to be employed by the U.S. military. Wang observes that
20 See Wang’s manuscript entitled “Transpacific Asymmetries: Masao Miyoshi and Asian American Studies.”
the stories of the two Harukis, having been retrieved by both Ruth and Nao, “recommend a different form of transpacific knowledge about the significances of violence and agency that remain subterranean to the official histories—American, Canadian, and Japanese—of war and peace.” Embedded in Nao’s diary, these stories call into question “Japan’s prosperity and security fostered under the wings of US military empire.” Yet with its arrival at “the now of Ruth,” these stories, especially that of Nao in Japan, risk becoming “contain[ed]” and
“domesticate[d]” in an “immigrant mode,” one that reaffirms North America as “the endpoint of history.” Wang argues that at the end of A Tale, Ruth’s imagination of Nao as still being alive after the 3.11 disasters and becoming a graduate student in Paris or Canada has reduced
“the urgency of Nao’s stories—for their function as the onset of Ruth’s writing have been fulfilled and can thus dissolve into the Asian American memory, as part of the ‘now’ of immigrant modernity, waiting to be washed ashore, recognized, and then suspended and set aside.” Such a mode of immigrant narration or imagining, as Wang makes clear, “enables Asian American literature to function as a repository of transpacific memories on the one hand and as a synecdoche of North America’s asymmetrical relation to Asia—based on amnesia, sympathy, and complicity—on the other.”
Having offered a critique of the immigrant narration that Ozeki employs to resolve her character Ruth’s inability to determine if Nao is alive or not, Wang moves on to examine “the moments of amnesia and forgetting” in A Tale. Importantly, he argues that while Ozeki is able to work through the connections between World War II and 9/11 by casting Nao as an
“Asian/American” figure, she has “ignored or suspended” other crucial connections, ones that are “inherent in the nuclear meltdown between Japan and the United States.” Following Muto Ichiyo’s observations (as discussed in Chapter One) that the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima is tied to Japan’s postwar state and the development of its nuclear power industry—a result of the U.S. “atoms for peace” campaign in the 1950s—and that the U.S. military presence in Okinawa is inextricably connected to such arrangements, Wang suggests that the
“transpacific complicity” between the United States and Japan “continues to exact damage on people and environment”; for Wang, “the vibrations of suffering, memory, and resistance between Fukushima and Okinawa are real, poignant, and active.” Instead of examining this
“Fukushima-Okinawa resonance,” Ozeki chooses to take Fukushima as a point of departure to “hold present the memories of both 9/11 and World War II.” Highlighting the apparent negligence of these connections in Ozeki’s text, Wang emphasizes that “our imagination and knowledge of transpacific movement is not evenly shared, or worse may have been siphoned by the thinking of sameness with which the immigrant figure is simultaneously interpellated as physically visible and excluded as dispensable.”