Ruth Ozeki has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 61 ratings. The most-rated is A Tale for the Time Being.
A Tale for the Time Being
Summary
A brilliant, unforgettable, and long-awaited novel from best-selling author Ruth Ozeki "A?time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be." In Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace - and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox - possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki's signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and listener, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
©2013 Ruth Ozeki (P)2013 Penguin Audio
My Year of Meats
Summary
Jane, a struggling filmmaker in New York, is given her big break, a chance to travel through the United States to produce a Japanese television program sponsored by American meat exporters. Meanwhile, Akiko, a painfully thin Japanese woman struggling with bulimia, is being pressured by her child-craving husband to put some meat on her bones, literally. How Jane's and Akiko's lives intersect in wacky crosscultural collisions provides romance, humor, intrigue, and even a muckraking message about questionable meat and the Wal-Martification of America.
©1998 Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury (P)2003 Blackstone Audiobooks
All Over Creation
Summary
Meet Yumi Fuller. A Japanese-American prodigal daughter, Yumi (aka Yummy) is returning home to the Idaho potato farm she ran away from twenty-five years earlier. Then a freewheeling hippie chick, Yumi is now a fairly responsible parent and a professor with a side gig selling lava lots in Hawaii. But can she possibly be prepared to face her dying father, her Alzheimer's-devastated mother, and Cass, the best friend she left behind? As she grapples with her conflicted past and uncertain future, Yumi collides with the Seeds of Resistance, a rollicking band of environmentalists who see her parents' potato farm as an ideal in their fight against genetic engineering. With her signature wit and uncanny ability to evoke the pathos and humor of life's conundrums, Ozeki spins a tale of family, food, and corporate greed. All Over Creation is the emotionally resonant and utterly unique story of an ordinary woman just trying to make sense of it all as the unceasing cycle of all creation continues around her.
©2003 Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury (P)2003 Blackstone Audiobooks
No-No Boy
Summary
First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel's importance and popularized it as one of literature's most powerful testaments to the Asian American experience. No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys". Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle. As Ozeki writes, Ichiro's "obsessive, tormented" voice subverts Japanese postwar "model-minority" stereotypes, showing a fractured community and one man's "threnody of guilt, rage, and blame as he tries to negotiate his reentry into a shattered world".
©1976 Dorothy Okada (P)2018 Tantor