Writing the Anthropocene: Environmental Crisis and Oceanic Imaginations in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

By situating “transpacific” as a critical space that allows oceanic exchange between Japan and Canada, the past and the present, and human and nonhuman, this essay critically examines how Ozeki’s third novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013), helps us apprehend “slow violence,” one that is hard to see or feel due to the workings of time and distant locations. While mainstream Anthropocene discourse has tended to focus more on the perspectives of white elites, writers and scientists based in the Global North, Ozeki’s novel draws the reader’s attention to the fluidity of oceanic movements and intentionally blurs the boundaries between human history and environmental history, especially the links between nuclear bombing in Japan during the World War II and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, in order to emphasize a complex crisis for both human and nonhuman on a planetary scale. Building on what Elizabeth DeLoughrey terms “the oceanic turn” in literatary studies, I argue that Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being challenges and works to decolonize the discourses of the Anthropocene and thus invites us to imagine more just and sustainable environmental futures for the more-than-human world.