I’ve been a huge fan of Ruth Ozeki’s writing ever since both Vicky and I fell in love with her fabulous novel, A Tale for the Time Being. I had gotten an advanced reader copy in early 2013—probably my best ARC ever. Sadly, for us as true-blue booksellers who had closed our very last bookstore, we both dearly missed handselling this gem to our good customers. Having loved Tale so much, I took a chance on this book about a writer/Zen priest watching her face in a mirror, with her laptop handy … for three hours. This book written by most authors wouldn’t have attracted my attention, but Ozeki is certainly not most authors.

The Face: A Time Code is written in chapters that reflect the many directions her mind traveled in those three hours, along with an occasional time stamp on the page. She had thought of the project as a variation of when a Harvard professor, Jennifer L. Roberts, had art history and architecture students spend three hours observing a single work of art and making a detailed record of their observations.

Here are a few timestamps showing her active mind.
00:19:02
“I’m feeling pretty idiotic right now. This experiment is ridiculous. Narcissistic. Solipsistic. Banal. I don’t want to do it anymore. Isn’t it time for coffee?”
01:07:52
“Making familiar things strange is the job of the artist.”
01:24:21
“Why am I writing this? Because I’m seriously bored with my face.”
02:22:49
“My mom’s mouth was crooked. She had a wry and crooked smile, which I inherited from her. I always loved her smile, and now it makes me smile to see her smile in mine.”
2:58:36
“And maybe here’s a bit of insight: My face is and isn’t me. It’s a nice face. It has lots of people in it. My parents, my grandparents, and their grandparents, all the way back through time and countless generations to my earliest ancestors—all those iterations are here in my face, along with all the people who’ve ever looked at me. And the light and shadows are here, too, the joys, anxieties, griefs, vanities, and laughter.”

After the measured time period, Ozeki continued reflecting on the experience, oh, these Zen priests. “In the days and weeks and months that have followed, I find myself looking at people’s faces more closely. There’s a new subjectivity in my gaze when I look at others. Their faces mirror mine, and my face mirrors theirs, and this gives rise to a feeling of recursive kindliness and kinship that I haven’t felt in quite this way before.”

The book made me think of Vicky’s dislike of so many people’s quest for perfection in things, especially when Ozeki wrote about a traditional Japanese mask-making class that she took. “You’ve been working on it for up to a year, and finally, just as it’s nearing perfection, you have to make it imperfect again, but perfectly so. Perfectly imperfect.” As Vicky never thought much about her age—when asked, most times she had to work it out just how old she was—Ozeki reminded me of her again with the following. “I like my gray hair, and surgery is not right for me. I want to look my age. I want to find some beauty in this face, the way it is. I want to be okay with who I am. Right now. Just this.”

I can’t even imagine all the places that my mind would go in three hours. At one point, Ozeki’s thoughts went back to when her parents died. “I sat with both my parents as they died. I listened to them breathe and watched their faces change, day by day, hour by hour, as life leaked out of them. They looked so different in life—my father, a tall, blond, blue-eyed Caucasian, and my mother a small, brown-eyed, black-haired Asian—but old age and death erased so many of the differences between them, and in the end, they looked surprisingly similar.” Witnessing a loved one’s decline and death, we all are faced with thoughts about our own death. “I remember thinking, I’m going to do this, too, some day. This is what dying looks like. This is what Dad looked like when he died, and what I’m going to look like too. Like Mom and Dad. It was comforting to know what I would look like. It made death a little less frightening.”
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In an interesting aside, she reveals her sensitive side when writing about adopting her pen name of Ruth Ozeki, after being born Ruth Diana Lounsbury. She borrowed the name Ozeki from a former boyfriend, and then later felt compelled to apologized to the man’s eventual wife for using the name. She had adopted the pen name to avoid bringing any possible embarrassment to her own family from her writing.
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As so often happens when I look over all the lines and points of a book that I have marked with Post-its, all before I write an impression or a review of a book, I tend to gain a better appreciation for a book. Yes, that’s exactly why I do it. Ozeki stated it wonderfully when she wrote the following toward the end of her book. “This is why we read novels, after all, to see our reflections transformed, to enter another’s subjectivity, to wear another’s face, to live inside another's skin.” For some time after reading this book, I found myself looking at the faces around me, but in these times, most of them were behind masks. So, I find myself lingering longer at the bathroom mirror, and my thoughts do go everywhere, but I’m not writing them down. I don’t have the talent to improve on Ozeki’s writing and you should be thanking me for keeping those thoughts in my head. But I’m sure that you have a mirror in your life, and you could have a go at it. ( )

A philosophical memoir on selfhood from Ruth Ozeki, part of a series of writerly reflections on their face, identity, and books. Intermixed with a thoughtful traditional memoir on race, parental impact, femininity and aging, she also includes snippets from the experience of meditating on her face in a mirror for three (long) hours, a practice inspired by the Buddhist charnel house meditation.

I found this book gripping and very easy to read, with a few observations that particularly resonated and a few that feel ever so slightly sore. I'm sure my appreciation is in part related to my fascination with Buddhism and identity, and would recommend this book to anyone with similar interests. I'll definitely read more by Ozeki, and I'm quite curious about what the other equally-unknown-to-me authors in this series produced on this theme (Chris Abani and Tash Aw). ( )