Film and television In 1985, Ozeki moved to
New York City and began working as an art director and production designer for low-budget horror movies, including
Mutant Hunt (1987) and
Robot Holocaust (1986). In 1988, she began working for Telecom Staff, a Japanese production company, coordinating, producing and directing documentary-style programs for Japanese TV. During this time, she directed episodes of
See the World by Train and co-produced the pilot for the TV documentary miniseries
Fishing With John (1991), starring musician
John Lurie and director
Jim Jarmusch. Ozeki's first film,
Body of Correspondence (1994), made in collaboration with artist
Marina Zurkow, won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and was aired on
PBS. Ozeki's second film,
Halving the Bones (1995), tells the autobiographical story of her journey as she brings her grandmother's remains home from Japan. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the
Sundance Film Festival, and screened at the
Museum of Modern Art, the
Montreal World Film Festival, and the
Margaret Mead Film Festival, among others.
Writing Ozeki's debut novel
My Year of Meats (Viking Penguin, 1998), based on her work in Japanese television, tells the story of two women, living on opposite sides of the world, whose lives are connected by a TV cooking show.
My Year of Meats was awarded the 1998
Kiriyama Prize and the 1998 Imus/Barnes & Noble American Book Award. Her second novel,
All Over Creation (Viking Penguin, 2003), focuses on a potato-farming family in Idaho and an environmental activist group opposing the use of
GMOs. Author
Michael Pollan called
All Over Creation "a smart compelling novel about a world we don't realize we live in."
All Over Creation received the 2003
WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction and the 2004
American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Ozeki's 2013 novel,
A Tale for the Time Being (Viking Penguin) tells the story of a mysterious diary written by a troubled schoolgirl in
Tokyo that has washed ashore on the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada in the wake of the
2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The diary is discovered by a novelist named Ruth, who becomes obsessed with discovering the girl's fate.
Junot Diaz called this novel Ozeki's "absolute best—bewitching, intelligent, hilarious, and heartbreaking, often on the same page." The novel was awarded the 2013
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and named the first recipient of the 2015
Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award (founded by the Leo Tolstoy Museum & Estate and
Samsung Electronics) for the Best Foreign Novel of the 21st century. The book has received several other national and international awards, and has been published in more than thirty countries. In her first work of personal nonfiction,
The Face: A Time Code (Restless Books, 2016), Ozeki writes about a three-hour observation experiment, in which she studied her reflection in a mirror and kept a log of thoughts that arose during that time.
The Face: A Time Code was published as part of Restless Books' groundbreaking series,
The Face, featuring authors
Tash Aw and
Chris Abani. In 2021, Ozeki released her fourth novel
The Book of Form and Emptiness. About a 14-year-old boy who begins to hear voices emanating from things in the house after the death of his father, the book won the
Women's Prize for Fiction in June 2022.
Teaching From 1982 through 1985, Ozeki taught in the English department at
Kyoto Sangyo University and founded an English language school in
Kyoto, Japan. Currently, she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Zen Ozeki was ordained as a
Soto Zen Buddhist priest in 2010; she practices
Zen Buddhism with
Zoketsu Norman Fischer. She is the editor of the website Everyday Zen. == Personal life ==