Michael Zryd

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 18.35 ( Spring - Summer / printemps - ete, 2001):120-32.

Michael Zryd

University of Western Ontario

Ironic Identity Frames and Autobiographical Documentary:

Ruth L. Ozeki’s Halving the Bones and My Year of Meat

Again, I felt the warm smugness that comes over me when I know that there is another heart-wrenching documentary moment at hand, being exquisitely recorded. (Ozeki, Meat 175)

Half-documentarian, half-fabulist.... Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes. (Ozeki, Meat 360)

Your looking is always crooked, from side of eye. (Ozeki, Meat 314)

These three quotations from My Year of Meat1, Ruth Ozeki's 1998 quasi-autobiographical novel, suggest the complex range of her irony and her self-consciousness of how knowledge is constructed in nonfiction texts, both literary and filmic. My Year of Meat follows the adventures of a Japanese American documentary filmmaker, Jane Tagaki-Little, working as a self-described "cultural pimp" pandering American culture for Japanese television audiences. Growing out of Ozeki's decade of work in the media industry - as she says, "I don't think I could have written a novel had I not been a filmmaker first" (Conversation 12) - My Year of Meat develops out of and expands upon the preoccupations of her independent film, Halving the Bones, released three years earlier. Halving the Bones, which she describes as "a documentary with fictional lapses," (Conversation 9) reverses My Year of Meat's trajectory of cultural education, sketching aspects of Japanese culture for her intended North American audience. What both novel and film share and mutually illuminate is the elaboration of a basically comic universe, dedicated to confronting realities of historical racial, gender, and generational conflict, but also dedicated to resolutions of cultural integration and understanding. In this way, Ozeki reverses the contemporary tendency for irony to function as a trope of division, separating those who "get" the irony and those excluded from it, making it, instead, an almost utopian trope of integration and imagination.

In My Year of Meat, Jane is a fictional documentary film producer who agrees to make episodes of a Japanese television program, My American Wife!, sponsored by an American meat-producer's lobbying organization. Jane's picaresque quest for "healthy American wives" structures the novel, a quest across America in search of women and families who, in addition to making delicious meat recipes, have to embody the contradictory stereotypes of "authentic" American culture so crucial to mainstream media.2 The novel's second central character, Akiko, the anorexic wife of the television show's abusive Japanese producer John Ueno, signals the darker side of the novel and its political concerns with industrial meat production and dangers of additives like hormones and antibiotics. Although Jane and Akiko's narratives enact transformations in the personal sphere, Ozeki's frame of reference for their resistance is consistently cultural and political. Jane returns to independent filmmaking to fight against the complacent commercial dictates of the television and meat production industries, while Akiko leaves her husband, rejecting the confining dictates of Japanese codes of femininity (and masculinity). Moreover, the narrative is shot through with documentary textures; Ozeki concludes the novel with an "Author's Note": "Although this book is a novel, and therefore purely a work of my imagination, as a lapsed documentarian I feel compelled to include a bibliography" (Meat 363).

If My Year of Meat is a fiction arising out of nonfiction, Halving the Bones is a documentary which uses fiction to further its investigation of Ozeki's own personal history, the three generations of Japanese American women on her mother's side of the family: Matsuye, Ruth's grandmother; Masako, Ruth's mother, and finally Ruth herself. Matsuye was born in Japan but arrived in Hawaii through an arranged marriage to a poet/photographer; there, she worked hand-tinting photographs taken by her husband. The metaphor of photography as memory, colored and altered by subjectivity, is evoked throughout the film. In Hawaii, Matsuye is diagnosed with an ovarian tumor and returns to Japan for medical treatment; it turns out she is in fact pregnant with Masako. This second metaphor, Ruth's mother as tumor, is evoked by Ruth to understand how race is constructed as malignancy - but a malignancy generative of ironic consciousness. Masako, although she achieved graduate degrees in linguistics, concentrated on "homemaking," a role whose tension and ambivalence is pondered by Ozeki in the film. Several years before Halving the Bones begins, grandmother Matsuye dies in an old-age home in Japan. Only Ruth goes to the funeral; Masako claims that her arthritic knees would have prevented her from kneeling and thus from properly participating in the funeral. Ruth is skeptical of this excuse. While there, she is given several of her grandmother's bones to give to the absent Masako as a "nice gesture" from the Japanese relatives. Ruth's quest in the film is finally to deliver the bones to her estranged mother, and, in so doing, to reconnect with her mother and understand her own cultural and generational history. As a narrator in Halving the Bones explains at the start of the film:

Five years after her Japanese grandmother dies, she still had her bones... to give to her mother.... Now Ruth has decided that something must be done about the bones. The idea of her grandmother, fragmented and ignored, has begun to bother her.

Structurally, the film is divided into roughly two sections. The first is highly layered and formally textured. It lays out this family history mediated by a range of voices and evidential sources, including "fake documentaries" of her grandmother's and mother's past. The second part of the film is more stylistically homogenous, using cinema verité style to observe Ruth's cagey confrontation with her mother and the hand-over of the bones. It turns out that while Ruth is interested in nostalgically investigating the past, in the "exploration of self," her mother lives in the present and could care less about the bones. Ozeki uses this generational gap to undercut both her own quest and her mother's evasiveness in confronting history. Examining three generations of women in her family, she positions the film persona of Ruth as a sharp-eyed but ultimately gentle and self-ironic commentator on the choices, compromises, and courage these women demonstrate in the face of (at least) two national cultures' constrictions of femininity and race.

Rachel Rosen, in Film Comment, reviewed the film at its 1996 Sundance Film Festival screening, calling it "stylistically adventurous" and "artfully executed" but ultimately a "modest" film (53). While seeming perhaps to damn it with faint praise, this evaluation is, I think, an important insight into this comic universe and the quality of the irony Ozeki brings to the film and to her writing. Anti-monumental, suspicious of the grand pronouncement, her irony rhetorically seeks complexity, sometimes at the expense of satisfyingly clear judgment and action. The "modest irony" of the film, aware of its own perspectival limitations, is key to the appeal of Ozeki's character in the film and novel and finally crucial to the ethical power and cultural inclusivity to which she aspires.

Irony, indeed, is central to Ozeki's central characters Jane and Ruth, mediating their sense of racial and national identity, grounding their agency and imagination, and finally, allowing Ozeki to conceive of identity as a dialectic of cultural construction, both given and made. In My Year of Meat, Jane's mother observes, "Your looking is always crooked, from side of eye" (314), echoing an earlier statement by Jane that she is "always speaking out of both sides of my mouth" (176). Although Ozeki acknowledges the dangers of ambivalence and prevarication that attend "sideways" looking and speaking, this indirection is largely seen as a strength, especial-ly for multi-perspectival cultural observation and analysis. Ozeki has discussed her embrace of irony's multi-perspectivalism, the power to say one thing and mean another, to open the text to be seen as saying many things at once (Lounsbury, Interview). This multiperspectivalism is also explicitly linked to her "polyracial, perverse" subject position: "being racially 'half' - neither here nor there"(Ozeki, Meat 9). Hyphenated cultural identity invites, for Ozeki, a structural, even embodied ironic perspective. Furthermore, the multiple modes of irony, from attacking sarcasm to self-irony to complex open irony, construct a voice appropriate to her sophisticated meditations on cultural identity, political commentary, and documentary ethics.

Yet what is most striking about her work is that, while grounded in irony, it shares none of the cynicism, flippancy, or epistemological laziness in which much contemporary ironic discourse indulges. Where certain uses of irony can encourage a deferral of meaning and a distancing attitude of quietism, Ozeki's irony maintains an ethics of inquiry into truth, an ethics grounded in documentary film's traditional social mission: as Jane says, "I became a documentarian partly in order to correct cultural misunderstandings" (88-9). She is a self-described "absolute relativist" who, while obviously sceptical of the claims of "Truth," demonstrates nonetheless in both novel and film a commitment to what I can only call an ethics of fairness in relation to both her subjects and her audience. Remarkably, Ozeki is devoted to both the indirection of irony - the crooked look - and a rhetoric of full disclosure.

The protagonist of My Year of Meat discusses the evolution of her understanding of truth and the way it is inflected by her understanding of race and identity as constantly changing and shifting categories:

in the next millennium, the idea of an indigenous person or plant or culture will just seem quaint.
Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we're all going to be brown, sort of. Somedays, when I'm feeling grand, I feel brand-new - like a prototype.... Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world. (15)

This optimism in a future free of the divisive nature of racial categories is nonetheless grounded in an understanding of the history of racial and cultural conflict, an understanding which motivates Jane's work as a documentary filmmaker in My Year of Meat:

I had spent so many years, in both Japan and America, floundering in a miasma of misinformation about culture and race, I was determined to use this window into mainstream network television to educate. Perhaps it was naive, but I believed, honestly, that I could use wives to sell meat in the service of a Larger Truth. (27)

While questioning the idea of a "Larger Truth," the epistemological imperative is not ignored, and neither is the ethical responsibility of the documentary filmmaker to represent her subjects fairly. In this extended passage, Ozeki eloquently describes the tension inherent in the process of constructing "characters" out of the images and sounds of the real people who are the subjects of documentary filmmaking, a tension she had explored earlier in Halving the Bones.

I was not always so cavalier with my wives as I sometimes sound. To some extent, the pretense was necessary in order to keep up with our production schedule and get the programs out. But the fact is, I did care, and at the same time I couldn't afford to care and these two contrary states lived side by side like twins, wrapped in a numbing cocoon that enabled me to get the work done. Psychiatrists call this "doubling." Here's another example. I wanted to make programs with documentary integrity, and at first I believed in a truth that existed-singular, empirical, absolute. But slowly, as my skills improved and I learned about editing and camera angles and the effect that music can have on meaning I realized that truth was like race and could be measured only in ever-diminishing approximations. Still, as a documentarian, you must strive for the truth and believe in it wholeheartedly. Halved as I am, I was born doubled. By the time I wrote the pitch for My American Wife my talent for speaking out of both sides of my mouth was already honed. (175-6)

The ethical conflict inherent in representation between serving one's own agenda and serving the integrity of one's subjects creates a "doubling" for Jane. This ethical doubling in turn becomes an epistemological doubling, a wholehearted search for truth which must nonetheless take into account the ways in which truths are constructed and manipulated, and indeed, derive from multiple perspectives on the world. Jane and Ozeki use their liminal racial identity - "Halved as I am" - as a basis for a search for a small-t truth, more complex, multiple, and analytical. In particular, Ozeki understands that truth is less "found" than constructed, analyzed, and synthesized, a process she describes in a section of the novel entitled, "Editing Room":

Truth lies in layers, each of them thin and barely opaque, like skin, resisting the tug to be told. As a documentarian, I think about this a lot. In the edit, timing is everything. There is time to peel back. (Ozeki, Meat 175)

The delicacy of this metaphor, that the search for truth is as fine and sensitive and painful as peeling layers of skin, and requires patience and timing, is further evoked by Ozeki in an interview statement that her investigations of cultural relativism derive from what she describes as "Buddhist values of precision and compassion." Relativism, although it is usually understood as inimical to truth (if everything is relative to subjective standpoints, how can there be a stable truth?) is, for Ozeki, a gesture of respect for the validity of subjective standpoints. Most importantly, relativism can encourage compassion, the ability to imagine another's perspective and sympathize with their values, feelings, and perceptions. However, without what Ozeki terms "precision," compassion can simply become projection, the imposition of one's own subjective values, feelings, and perceptions. Her articulation of truths as layered, interconnected, intersubjective, and constructed propositions undergirds the optimistic and "constructive" sensibility which is expressed in her literary and film work: "Half-documentarian, half-fabulist.... Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes" (Ozeki, Meat 360).

Halving the Bones furnishes a critical perspective on two contemporary documentary film genres: the popular ironic documentary and the Asian American autobiographical documentary. The rise of irony in documentary film over the 1990's parallels the rise of first person and directly commentative documentary address since the 1960's. Since Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989) demonstrated for the media market that documentary could be funny and entertaining (and to a certain extent commercially viable), popular documentary (theatrically released, cable and broadcast television, and the cult film) has increasingly turned to irony as a mode of address. At worst, this has led to increasingly sensational subject matter, a focus on the "subject as freak," and dominant attitudes of cynicism, mocking superiority, and cruelty. The proliferation of the "fake documentary," which parodies documentary form itself, and the increased acceptability of reconstructions in documentary, have both contributed to skepticism of documentary's truth-telling ability. This is in part salutary - but just as documentaries should not be believed just because they are documentaries, neither should documentaries be distrusted simply because they are documentaries and aspire to tell some kind of truth.

Another recent development in popular ironic documentary is the cultivation of documentary "personalities" who function as the rhetorical epicentres of the film: Michael Moore, Nick Broomfield, Marcel Ophuls, and Andrei Codrescu are examples. Aristotle, for one, preferred the character of the eiron to his opponent, the self-assured alazon, whose lack of self-consciousness made him dangerous in his certainty-and of course an easy target for the ironist. While Moore, Broomfield, and Ophuls all use self-irony to some extent, their ethos, as their careers progressed, has increasingly taken on some of the self-importance of the alazon. The modest self-irony of Ozeki refreshingly undercuts this hyperbolic personality (and its self-assured and often unreflective masculinist privilege). This modest irony is also salutary in preserving what almost all irony secretly retains: sincerity, which is clear in Ozeki's clear-eyed, judgmental, but also loving and sympathetic attitude toward her subjects.

Halving the Bones also fits into the genre of Asian American personal autobiographical documentary, a genre which often specifically examines the relation of the filmmaker to family through the thematics of loss. Ruth states towards the end of Halving the Bones that it is "an attempt to come to terms with my mother and her past." The genre has a number of common tropes: first person address, a therapeutic motivation regarding family integration and understanding, and a thematization of memory as unreliable, traumatic, characterized as much by silence and erasure as presence and clarity. Japanese American autobiographical films like Halving the Bones, Lisa Yasui's A Family Gathering (1990), Janice Tanaka's Who's Going to Pay For These Donuts Anyway? (1993), and Rea Tajiri's influential History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) are all concerned to different degrees with the central historical event of the WWII internment camps, and the dilemma that the legacy of the camps presents for contemporary hybrid Japanese Americans. What is the proper relationship to an American culture which both inflicted this experience on one's ancestors and lives in denial of its violations and hypocrisies? All these films challenge the sentimentality and comfortable confidence of empirical oral history through reflexive formal gestures. But where films in this genre tend to emphasize the melancholic inevitability of loss, Halving the Bones uses irony - often seen as a hollow trope of critique - to fill in the gaps left by loss.

What remains to be discussed is Ozeki's elaboration of multiple voices in Halving the Bones, and the way she modulates these voices to three rhetorical outcomes: first, a move of disclosure which grounds her voice's ethical centre; second, an attack on American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda; and third, a decision to refuse the position of passive victim of American racism in favor of comic integration, a choice to renegotiate hyphenated identity, precisely through the ironic embrace of that which has been constructed as marginal and malignant.

A series of playful and unstable voices opens Halving the Bones, starting with the title credit, phrased as a question: "making a family album?" The first voice we hear is a woman speaking Japanese, and then a voice giving the heavy accented English translation. For a non-Japanese audience, the foreign voice and then the broken English one suggest an exotic perspective; notably, these voices speak in the omniscient third person. Then a third voice-over, that of a woman with an American accent, enters to speak in the first person: "My name is Ruth, but I don't like it. It's not a good name for a young person. I don't know why my mother chose it. My mother is Japanese, and Japanese people can't pronounce 'r' or 'th.'" This voice is set off from the first two, suggesting an alienation from "Japanese people" and acknowledging a common Western joke about Japanese pronunciation of English. She notes that the name translates into Japanese as "Not at home" or "She is absent," a metaphor which will serve to evoke Ruth's lack of clear, marked identity-at least in relation to the national sites of Japan and America.

The Japanese-accented English voice-over returns to narrate a section of the film titled "Grandma Matsuye's Story." Under plaintive "exotic" flute, illustrated by standard documentary types of evidence (photographs, maps, documents), we hear the grandmother's story in first person. The voice-over, though obviously not read by the real (and of course, dead) grandmother, narrates an autobiographical story. The voice speaks in idealistic terms of meeting her husband and discovering "love at first sight" despite being shipped off to an arranged marriage. Ruth's voice-over immediately interjects, "My grandmother says it was love at first sight, but this appears to be an out and out lie." Ruth's voice is baldly skeptical; its function in relation to the interaction of the grandmother's and her own voice is to undercut the sentimental conventionality of the immigrant saga so familiar to the autobiographical family documentary genre.

In fact, all of the voices in the film thus far are spoken by Ozeki herself, who invites the viewer into a web of absent or siteless identities. But then a new voice enters the film in the person of Ruth's mother, Masako. She speaks without a script in a much more conversational and direct tone, and, as Ozeki has said, pulls the film out of its "mess" (Lounsbury, Address). She functions as yet another sceptical perspective to qualify both the grand-mother's idealized autobiography and Ruth's contemplative but studied narration. Her first words, spoken to camera in talking-head interview style, are "Can I start? I'm Masako, Matsuye's daughter, and Ruth's mother, and I'm not a tumor." She offers a skeptical metacommentary on the film's oral family history methodology: "I don't think you can talk about accuracy in memory.... Without realizing it, you want to color it... make it somehow to your advantage." One admirable quality of Ozeki's self-irony is that it serves, in part, to strengthen the voice of her mother. Documentary subjects have much less control over their filmic presentation than the filmmaker does, a power imbalance Ozeki respects.

About twenty minutes into the film, Ruth's voice-over reappears over footage of herself driving; with a knowing glance at the camera through the rear view mirror, underscoring her rhetorical presence, she confesses:

This is Ruth again. I want to explain my plan [to return the bones to her mother] but first there's something I have to say. Up to now, I haven't been 100% accurate. There were a couple of things that I made up. Like my grandmother's autobiography, for example. She didn't write it so it was made up from family stories. I did the same thing with the home movies. I've seen a photo of my grandfather holding a movie camera, so I know he really did make movies. But his camera and films were confiscated after Pearl Harbor. I made up these things but I never really knew my grandparents and now they're dead and I didn't have very much to go on. I thought I would understand them better if I just pretended to be them. Anyway, I just wanted to set the record straight. Even though I made up the way I represented them, the facts of their lives were all true.

This is the clearest expression of Ozeki's ethics of disclosure, and within the context of contemporary fake documentary practice, it is a remarkable gesture. She "comes clean" not through a disclaimer or a surprise ending, but midway through the film as a way to give the audience a chance. As she says, Ozeki wants to be inclusive, presenting the secret knowledge that comes with irony but letting the audience in on it (Lounsbury, Interview).

This disclosure also suggests the film's overlap of fictional and ironic frames. A fictional frame is now explicitly put around the mode of the grandmother's story, though not around - Ozeki claims - the "facts" of the story. This fiction and its unreliable narrator have already been questioned by an ironic framing set up via Ruth's questioning voice-over. But these fictional and ironic frames create neither epistemological confusion nor meaninglessness. Rather, the authority of Ruth's voice is deepened by her setting the record straight: not only does she seem to value honesty and fairness as ethical values (which gets attached to her ethos), but she gains the authority of irony as well: she accrues the authority of a critical outlook on her family history, and a complex evaluative edge which undercuts the traps of the sincere autobiographical family documentary. Oral history is tested by Ruth's authoritative voice. Self-irony increases authority through controlled self-critique. The flexibility of this voice, finally, allows her simultaneously to question her mother (Ruth is suspicious of her mother's later claims that Ruth's grandfather didn't resent the internment camps) and to understand her mother's denials (that Matsuye said she "understood" the internment policy). Although Ruth implies that the camps in fact broke the spirit of her grandfather, who returned to Japan in 1960, she allows for ambiguities and aporias and "understands" her mother's need for her fiction. She acknowledges but evades the impossible desire to completely comprehend her family and their relation to their history.

Ozeki questions yet another voice of the film: the voice of American culture which, during World War II, demonized and interned Japanese American citizens. This voice first appears during a section entitled "Mom's Story." Ozeki inserts an excerpt from a WWII propaganda film directed to American factory workers: a booming male voice asks, "Have you killed a Jap soldier today?" The factory workers, insisting on their patriotism, protest, "This isn't Guam. This isn't the Philippines. This is America!" Ruth's voice quietly rejoins, as the image track cuts to a contemporary tracking shot of suburban homes (where Ruth's mother lives): "This is Connecticut. There weren't any Japanese soldiers here when I was growing up. Except Mom." The segue suggests that the propaganda film's attempt to take the war home, to argue that the home front was also helping defeat and kill the Japanese, was internalized by Japanese Americans caught between nat-ions.

Ruth further articulates how the propaganda constructed Japaneseness as malignancy. When her grandmother Matsuye used her pregnancy as an excuse to return to Japan by claiming that she had a cancerous lump in her belly, Ruth analyses how her mother is metaphorically cast as a cancer: "The metaphor contains something that I recognize: a deeply rooted conflation of sickness and race." Images of other American propaganda films (including the infamous cartoon Tokyo Jokio) are later intercut with images of her mother preparing a turkey for baking (an American holiday ritual she reluctantly adopts). Ruth reflects on the voice of American culture that constructed her own and her mother's ambivalence to Japanese culture:

The Yellow Peril, the malignant Japanese who had to be excised, the inscrutable Japanese who couldn't be trusted. I'd seen the images all my life and I believed them. Anyway, this was old history, but even so I knew I shared it. Mine was different from everyone else's in Connecticut, and obviously it was because of Mom. Her genes in my body had prevailed. So you see, it was this Eurocentric and primitive understanding of history and genetics that left me susceptible to a metaphoric confusion about my mother's origins. She'd started life as a tumor, and, cancerous, she'd spread. I was her offspring and hardly benign.

At the end of this monologue, we hear the "DING!" of an oven timer, a sign of revelation rich with bathos. This ironic sound effect underscores Ruth's darkly ironic conclusion: despite the internalized self-marginalization engendered by what she calls a "Eurocentric and primitive understanding of history," a critical, "hardly benign" consciousness was forming, capable of the analysis articulated by the film. While the racism of this voice of American propaganda invites a justifiably outraged reaction, Ozeki insists on an ultimately comic response, one which effectively refuses the divisiveness and self-hatred inherent in racism in favour of a constructive evolution. Ozeki includes another clip from a propaganda film which intones, under ominous music, that Japan was the "land of the little people who grew to believe that through blood and iron lay the short cut to greatness.... 'Made in Japan' became a sentence of death.... How will it end for the little people who wanted to enslave the earth?" Under this text Ozeki intercuts the stamp "Made in Japan" from the propaganda text with the photographs of her family we have seen through Halving the Bones. However, Ozeki immediately shifts from this attacking irony to a cooler, and less self-righteous address. The montage segues to what seems to be genuine colour home movies of a child (Ruth?) on a tricycle with Japanese sandals: "By the time I was a kid, 'Made in Japan' wasn't such a big deal anymore. It only meant it was cheap and nobody wanted it. But for me it was different." She goes to elaborate on the secret pride she took in the things her grandparents sent her from Japan after they resettled there in 1960. Eschewing the outraged ironic dismissal of propaganda images, a familiar ironic trope that she both uses and keeps her distance from, this quiet and casual tone strengthens the authority of her persona while not forgetting the racism and condescension of the propaganda text. Instead of lament - the tragic voice of loss - Ozeki shifts down to ironic defiance: playful, critical, self-aware, perhaps equivocal, but active and constructive.

Irony, then, is crucial to the comic sensibility of Ozeki's universe. Her personal, generational, and political investigations provoke proliferating and open perspectives; as Ruth says, she "pokes around in the past to imagine a future." As Ozeki says in relation to the self-described "happy ending" which concludes My Year of Meat, its irony is meant to both enable more complexity in terms of her fiction's "intellectual" work and to encourage imagination:

As the author, I wrote a happy ending, although, like Jane, I am suspicious of the efficacy of doing so. But happy endings satisfy the emotions, and I wanted to provide that type of satisfying narrative closure in the hope that it would free the intellect to continue its trajectory beyond the story line, pondering the issues the book raises. At the same time, by having Jane discuss the shortcomings of happy endings right smack in the middle of one, I was hoping to invite the reader into a more complex relationship with that ending. In essence, I point an authorial finger at the very thing that I am writing, and poke a hole in the seamlessness of the happy ending by making it self-referential and reflexive. Ironic. In the end, though, it is a tribute to the power of the imagination. You cannot make a better world unless you can imagine it so, and the first step toward change depends on the imagination's ability to perform this radical act of faith. (Conversation 13)

Ozeki's work is profoundly comic, future-directed, with the promise of utopia invested in the force of imagination.3 She takes the hollow cynicism that characterizes much contemporary irony and transforms it into a tool for movement, for moving on, for imagining a better world, acknowledging the enormities of history, but refusing to be trapped by them.

Note

The stills from Ozeki's Halving the Bones are reproduced here with the author's permission.