Zen Cyber and Transnational Feminisms

Beyond Machine Dreams: Zen, Cyber-, and Transnational Feminisms in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale
for the Time Being

Author(s): Marlo Starr
Source: Meridians, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2016), pp. 99-122
Published by: Indiana University Press
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M ARLO S TARR
Beyond Machine Dreams: Zen,

Cyber-, and Transnational
Feminisms in Ruth Ozeki’s
A Tale for the Time Being
Abstract
In Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being, sixteen-year-old Nao faces severe
bullying and sexual violence at her new school in Japan. Seeking escape, she experiments with
different identities, turning first to the Internet and then later to Zen Buddhist practices. These
approaches appeal to her because they allow her to transcend the bounds of her physical body,
but she soon finds these experiences limiting in other ways.
Intervening in discourses about the liberating potentials of cyber- and Buddhist feminisms,
Ozeki’s novel explores how experiences of disembodiment are empowering in some ways and
inhibiting in others. This article argues that A Tale for the Time Being critiques philosophies
that strive for social liberation by denying physicality and introduces a model of feminism that
balances material and bodily experiences with ideas of equality that emerge from cyber-,
Buddhist, and transnational feminist projects.
Nao Yasutani is not sure if she wants to live. The sixteen-year-old

Japanese girl, who takes center stage in Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale
for the Time Being, confides her troubles in her diary. Forced to leave her
California home and relocate with her family to Japan, she faces severe
bullying at school and is unable to rely on her suicidal father and absent
mother. Feeling powerless and alone, “a little wave person, floating around
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 13, no. 2 (2016): 99–122.

Copyright © 2016 Smith College. doi:10.2979/meridians.13.2.06
99
on the stormy sea of life,” Nao determines to kill herself; yet, before she
resorts to ending it all, she tests out a variety of different identities, turning
first to the Internet and then later to Zen Buddhism (Ozeki 2013, 42). She
is drawn to these two approaches as each, in its own way, allows her to
escape from her physical reality, but she soon learns that disembodiment
comes with its own set of traps. Fortunately for Nao, her story makes its
way into the hands of a concerned reader when, following a devastating
tsunami, her diary washes ashore on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Not unlike the novel’s author, Nao’s reader is a Japanese-American
novelist named Ruth. Given Ozeki’s weaving of autobiography and fiction
and her position as a Zen Buddhist priest, popular reviews of A Tale for the
Time Being have represented the novel as a “form of Buddhist meditation”
or a merging of “Buddhism and storytelling” (Scharzbaum 2013; AP 2015).
However, such a ready alignment of the book with Buddhist philosophy
may overlook ways that the novel grapples with and critiques contemporary
interpretations of Buddhist practices. Through the ostracized figure of
Nao, Ozeki intervenes in discourses about the liberating potentials of
disembodiment: considering, respectively, Buddhist meditation and cyber-
technologies as means for transcending bodily experiences.
For Nao, Buddhism’s nondualistic philosophy fosters a sense of con-
nection to all things, but she grows suspicious of the lack of individuality
produced by this thought and longs to assert herself as a unique entity.
Additionally, while Nao initially believes that the fluidity of the Internet
will allow her to create her own identity, she learns that she cannot
avoid gender discrimination even in cyberspace. Instead, the novel puts
forward an alternative model of feminism through its depiction of Ruth
and Nao’s transnational relationship, one that emphasizes interdepen-
dence and communal identity while also preserving individual differences.
This article argues that A Tale for the Time Being critiques philosophies that
strive for social liberation by denying physicality and introduces a model of
feminism that balances material and bodily experiences with ideas of equal-
ity that emerge from cyber-, Buddhist, and transnational feminist projects.
Postmodern Visions of Equality
As they are presented in the novel, digital communication and Buddhist

meditation are similar in that they allow participants to transcend the
100 MERIDIANS 13:2
boundaries of their physical bodies. The sensate body is abandoned off-
screen to explore virtual identities online, and in Zen meditation, the
body remains silent and still so that the mind can achieve a different state
of consciousness (Gross 1981, 74). Interacting with the Internet allows the
human mind to merge with technology, collapsing traditional binaries
between mind and machine, and Buddhist practice seeks to reveal the con-
nection between individual life to all things, bridging conceptual divides
between the self and others. In this way, both information technologies
and Zen meditation create experiences of disembodiment that generate
chimerical, hybrid identities, challenging notions of the self as a “coherent
entity” with firm boundaries (Toffoletti 2007, 4).
Because of their potential for radically disrupting traditional gender
norms and binaries, both cybertechnologies and Buddhist philosophies
have attracted thinkers invested in the deconstructive projects of postmodern
feminist theory. Perhaps the most notable figure in cyberfeminism, Donna
Haraway, invokes the image of the cyborg as a postcorporeal amalgamation,
blending human and machine to undermine traditional ways of perceiving
and categorizing human bodies. Rather than seeing the body as a natural
formation, this hybrid image shows that the human body is historically and
culturally constituted. The cyborg does not reinforce binaries like man/
machine, mind/body, and male/female but instead exposes how these
dualisms are constructed through cultural ideology (Haraway 1985, 180–81).
Following the entrance of the cyborg, more recent cyberfeminists envi-
sion the Internet as a powerful tool for “corrupting patriarchy” because
gender and race are not “visible” online in the same way they are in real
life (Daniels 2009, 102, 110).
Similarly, Buddhist philosophy is also appealing to feminists because of
its emphasis on nondualistic thinking (Martin 1996, 109). The idea that
the self is unitary and separate from others is illusory in Buddhist thought,
and therefore, perceived differences between the self and others and be-
tween races and genders are also deemed illusory. Fixating on this idea of
unity, some feminists go so far as to claim that “Buddhism is feminism”
and “feminism is Buddhism” (Byrne 2012, 182).
In A Tale for the Time Being, cyberfeminism and Buddhist feminism converge
in the hybridized figure of Jiko, Nao’s grandmother. A former feminist
activist turned Buddhist nun, Jiko has the ability to straddle multiple iden-
tities (Ozeki 2013, 6). Her presence raises questions about the fixity of
M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 101
individual identity because she simultaneously transgresses multiple cate-
gories and classifications. Studying her grandmother’s naked form in the
bathhouse, Nao observes that Jiko does not merely inhabit the body of
a 104-year-old woman but encompasses a range of personas across time:
Watching her pale, crooked body rise from the steam in the dark wooden
tub, I thought she looked ghostly—part ghost, part child, part young
girl, part sexy woman, and part yamamba, [mountain witch, mountain
hag], all at once. All the ages and stages, combined into a single time
being. (166)
At first glance, cyberfeminists and Buddhist feminists alike might find a

common postmodern dream in this layered image of ghost-girl-woman-hag.
According to nondualistic Buddhist thinking, Jiko belongs to all bodies
and ages; she is not separate from time as Zen Master Dōgen teaches—she
is a “time being” (Ozeki 2013, 260), and like idealized online represen-
tations discussed by cyberfeminists, her identity is multiple and fluid,
expressing various facets of her being in the same moment (Turkle
1995, 263). Worth noting, however, is that while this disembodied repre-
sentation breaches binaries of spirit/body and young/old, Jiko’s body re-
mains gendered as feminine, as a “girl,” “a woman,” and a “witch.” Even
in this chimerical imagining, gender remains categorically undisturbed,
and though Nao is awed by her grandmother’s pluralistic identity, she
can only see her as feminine—suggesting that gender dichotomies may
be more slippery or resistant to deconstruction or, perhaps, that undoing
some binaries may inadvertently reinforce others.
Indeed, for teenaged and ostracized Nao, whose position as an outsider
and a female elicits the cruelty of her peers, this dream of plurality repre-
sented by Jiko seems much harder to attain; in her experimentations with
identity using both the Internet and Buddhist meditation, Nao continues
to be excluded and cannot break free from her rigid social identity. At
her teacher’s urging to start a blog, Nao enters cyberspace imagining it to
be a liberating zone, an escape from the hardships presented by material
reality (Ozeki 2013, 125). Yet Nao faces the same difficulties and oppression
online as she does offline, and though she discovers a sense of power
through Zen meditation, she also finds the blurring of individual differences
created by nondualistic thinking dissatisfying and limiting in other moments.
102 MERIDIANS 13:2
A Domain of Her Own? Agency and Identity in Virtual Reality
Following the entrance of Haraway’s cyborg, feminist thinkers have contin-

ued to consider ways in which virtual technologies might facilitate gender
and racial equality. In the 1990s, a number of theorists welcomed the
advent of the Internet as bringing “the end of the body,” characterizing
electronic communication as a subversive tool because it enables users to
conceal differences of race and gender through text-based interactions and
avatars (Wajcman 2006, 12). Although these initial enthusiastic responses,
which figured digital technologies as a force against patriarchy, have been
checked by “increasing recognition of global online pornography and the
use of the Internet to traffic women, for example,” as Judy Wajcman points
out (13), theorists in recent years have continued to describe the Internet
with similar optimism. In Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, Mark
Hansen claims that online interactions and representations have the po-
tential to eliminate “otherness.” He argues, “By suspending the automatic
ascription of racial signifiers according to visible traits, online environments
can, in a certain sense, be said to subject everyone to what I shall call a
‘zero degree’ of racial difference” (Hansen 2006, 118).
Beyond discourses about the role of technology in achieving social justice,
in the public imagination, the Internet is also sometimes regarded as a
transcendent or emancipatory space. As Barbara Becker writes in her article
on identity and new technologies: “Electronic communication creates a
liberated and uninhibited means of constructing oneself. . . . [It allows
one] to bypass the fragility of one’s own body or ‘to escape from the bodily
prison’” (Becker 2000, 362). Cyberspace is regarded as a zone where indi-
viduals are afforded more control in shaping their identities than in the
physical world and, as Sherry Turkle demonstrates, as a space where users
often feel more control over their relationships than in their offline lives.
In fact, Turkle claims, electronic interactions are sometimes seen as more
rewarding than face-to-face interactions. In Alone Together: Why We Expect
More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Turkle takes up romantic
perceptions of digital technologies and the impact of life online on how
we experience offline intimacy. She argues that constant connection
through digital technology may actually erode our ability to forge meaning-
ful relationships, especially in terms of adolescents growing up “tethered”
to social media and cell phones:
With sociable robots we are alone but receive signals that tell us we are
together. Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expecta-
tions of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is a risk
that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the
parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing. Once we remove ourselves
from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life—and both robotics and
networked life do that—we become less willing to get out there and
take a chance. (Turkle 2011, 154)
According to Turkle, networked life creates an illusion of connection that

acts as a poor surrogate for intimate relationships. Additionally, though
people know that they cannot depend on “cyberfriends” and cyber com-
munities when they experience difficulties or grief, “the emotional charge
of cyberspace is high,” says Turkle: “People talk about digital life as
‘the place for hope,’ the place where something new will come to them.
In the past, one waited for the sound of the post—by carriage, by foot,
by truck. Now, when there is a lull, we check our e-mail, texts, and
messages” (153).
In a similar way, in A Tale for the Time Being, Nao looks to the Internet
with hope when her efforts to find community at home and at school are
frustrated. Nao’s father loses his job in the wake of the dot-com bubble
burst of the ’90s, and she is forced to emigrate from California back to
Japan with her family (Ozeki 2013, 42). Equipped with only basic Japanese
language skills, she is referred to only as “Transfer Student” at school,
and her outsider status is heard, seen, and “smelled” by her peers.1 Her
classmates crowd around her, bruising her with pinches and cutting her
skin and clothes with scissors, shouting that she stinks like a foreigner and
a poor person (48). They call her a slut but taunt that they would not have
sex with her for fear of catching some “disgusting American disease” (100).
Seeking relief from the assault on her physical body, Nao retreats to the
Internet after school; she soon learns, though, that cyberspace allows her
neither greater autonomy nor escape. She writes an alternative narrative,
giving a positive spin to her life events and posting them to her blog The
Future Is Nao!, in addition to messaging her friend Kayla in California
online. Eventually though, she starts to feel like a “fraud” and realizes that
no one reads her blog, and Kayla loses interest in talking with her (125).
Thinking about her inability to establish a presence online, she says:
104 MERIDIANS 13:2
I swear, even on the Internet people can give off a virtual smell that
other people pick up, although I don’t see how that’s possible. It’s not
like a real smell, with molecules and pheromone receptors and so on,
but it’s just as obvious as the stink in your armpits or the vibe you
give off when you’re poor and don’t have any confidence or nice stuff.
Maybe it’s something in the way your pixels start behaving, but I was
definitely starting to have it. (125–26)
In her description, Nao overlays olfactory sensation onto digital pixels,

mingling corporeal with noncorporeal realms of experience. She hopes
that she can escape the sexual harassment and abuse aimed at her as a
foreigner and a female but suspects that these bodily categories can be
sniffed out by others even through cyberspace. Through this incongruous
pairing of smell and virtual reality, Ozeki begins to reveal how Nao’s life in
the material world seeps into her life online, disrupting perceptions of the
Internet as a disembodied space removed from messy, lived experience.
In Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, Lisa Nakamura
contends that the body is not forgotten in virtual reality; instead, bodies
“get tricky in cyberspace” (Nakamura 2002, 8). She investigates Internet
identities and representations of “otherness,” in terms of race, class,
sexuality, gender, economic class, and age, to show how identity is “still
[stereo]typed online, still mired in oppressive roles even if the body has
been left behind or bracketed” (4). Mediating claims that the Internet allows
individuals to explore different “selves” through identity play, Nakamura
explains how identity tourism can reinforce hegemonies rather than under-
mine them. She writes:
Chosen identities enabled by technology . . . are not breaking the mold

of unitary identity but rather shifting identity into the realm of the
“virtual,” a place not without its own laws and hierarchies. Supposedly
fluid selves are no less subject to cultural hegemonies, rules of conduct,
and regulating cultural norms than are “solid.” . . . [Minorities] who
can log on to the Net and be taken for “white” participate in an ideology
of liberation from marginalized and devalued bodies. This kind of
technology’s greatest promise to us is to eradicate otherness. . . . (4)
Cultural assumptions about which bodies are more or less valuable are
not challenged online, says Nakamura, but are, in fact, reproduced when
women and minorities impersonate dominant identities. The Internet is
not devoid of social categories, and if it fulfills its promise of bringing
“equality,” it may in fact do so by erasing marginalized identities or making
them invisible.
In light of discussions about what new media technologies do or do
not do for oppressed identities, Ozeki’s novel can be read as a suspicious
reaction to optimism about the liberating potential of digital technologies.
Just as promises that the Internet can suspend “social categories” often go
unfulfilled, as well as fantasies that cyber-relationships can replace real-life
intimacies, the fictional Nao finds that she cannot escape her marginalized
status through technology. Her attempts to establish an online identity
that will transcend her lived experience—to create a presence beyond that
of “Transfer Student”—go nowhere as she is unable to connect with a
community. In an even more unsettling turn, instead of being the subject
of her online identity, she quickly finds herself the object of online bullying.
When Nao first discovers that her classmates have extended their harass-
ment online by posting “The Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student
Nao Yasutani,” a video staging her fake funeral, Nao does not sense
danger. Ironically, her dreams of escaping from her body are manifested
through the ultimate representation of disembodiment: death; yet the fact
that her classmates are able to hijack her online identity for their own
purposes counters perceptions, as Turkle points out, that individuals have
more power over interactions online. Nao does not even have control over
how her own name is used online, and in the next attack orchestrated
by her schoolmates she does not have ownership over her own image.
When the bullying escalates to being life-threatening, Nao discovers that
not only is her online identity not “freeing,” it is also not fluid: a group of
Nao’s classmates attack her in the school bathroom, tie her down, attempt
to rape her, and then post a video of the incident alongside an online
auction for her underwear (Ozeki 2013, 278). The violence enacted in the
school bathroom does not belong to one moment in Nao’s life but, once
published to the Internet, this moment of sexual abuse is frozen in time—
disseminated to a wider audience, with the potential to be looped, rewatched,
and re-experienced over again. Though the bruises and marks inflicted
on Nao’s body will eventually fade, the video becomes a part of her digital
footprint that is much harder to erase. In terms of memory, the Internet
is not as flexible as it is made out to be in early cyberfeminist discourses;
106 MERIDIANS 13:2
in fact, it can be even more rigid than material reality. As Nao’s father says
when he discovers the video, “Once stuff is up there, it sticks around, you
know? Follows you and it won’t go away” (351).
Rather than finding a safe haven in cyberspace, Nao learns that the lack
of control she has over her identity in real life also continues on the Internet,
and likewise, the lack of connection and community that she experiences
offline continues online. Indeed, avoiding embodiment does not necessarily
grant agency to oppressed individuals or groups or allow them to circumvent
the “maze of dualisms” that carves up the material world. Virtual reality
reproduces and extends social relations as they are experienced in the lived
lives of people, and feeling powerless, adrift, and alone, Nao concludes,
“There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace” (125).
“My skin was no longer a wall that separated us”:

Disembodiment in Zen Buddhist Practice
Similar to the way that the Internet is thought to facilitate a “zero degree”
of difference by doing away with the body, as Hansen claims, Buddhist
philosophy levels differences by blurring the boundaries of the body.
Unlike the Internet, though, Buddhism seeks to eliminate difference by
dissolving the individual ego. Where cybertechnologies supposedly create
equality by eliminating conceptions of “other,” Buddhism is thought to
create equality by denying conceptions of “self.” For Buddhist feminists,
though, the lived experience of gendered embodiment and factual social
inequalities present unique challenges in achieving the fluid identity that
Buddhism promises.
According to prominent American Buddhist feminist, theologian, and
author of Buddhism After Patriarchy Rita Gross, feminists in the West have
been drawn to the Eastern philosophy of Buddhism since the 1960s because
they find the teachings to be “gender-free and gender-neutral” (Gross
2005). Because of the absence of a male god in Buddhist thought and be-
cause of its nondual philosophy, these Western converts see Buddhist
teachings as aligned with their political beliefs (Byrne 2012, 181). However,
as Sandy Boucher, another influential American Buddhist, explains, con-
verts are sometimes surprised to learn that institutional practices do not
always match up with Buddhism’s egalitarian philosophies. She describes
a movement of feminist activists who began joining monasteries in the
1970s—a period of US history marked by growing popular awareness of
Asian religions (Boucher 1988, 6–8). She writes:
Once involved in Buddhist practice, [American women] find themselves

confronting a tradition that has always held women to be inferior. . . .
However, looking carefully, they also see that because its history in
the United States is so short, its practices here not yet firmly embedded
in the cement of tradition, American Buddhism offers unique opportu-
nities for the incorporation of women’s experience and the alteration
of forms to encourage female participation and leadership. (3–4)
For Boucher, women have taken advantage of Buddhism’s recent rise in

popularity in the US in order to reconcile the philosophies with their
politics. Richard Seagar, in his history of Buddhism’s spread in America,
also explains how women converts have played a major role in interpreting
and modifying practices to emphasize a feminist perspective. “Between
the ’60s and ’90s,” he says, “American women became a major force as
practitioners and as teachers, intellectuals, and leaders in ways different
from women in Asia. Virtually all commentators within the Buddhist
community now note that the hallmark of American Buddhism is the way
in which the dharma is being transformed in terms of gender equity”
(Seagar 2012, 218).
In these accounts, Buddhist feminism began with American appropria-
tions of Asian philosophies in the 1960s and ’70s, elevating women to
positions of leadership that they historically have not enjoyed in more
traditional forms of Buddhism. In Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender,
however, Bernard Faure complicates this history by examining the impor-
tant roles women have played in foundational Buddhist movements,
“not only as nuns and female mystics, but also as mothers (and wives)
of monks” as well as the “courtesans and prostitutes, who were privileged
interlocutors of the monks” (Faure 2003, 1). He contends that Buddhism
is “paradoxically neither as sexist nor as egalitarian as is usually thought”
and writes: “Until now, the story of women in Buddhism has been repre-
sented in a relatively linear fashion: as a shift from oppression to freedom,
a teleological narrative of progress and liberation” (1–2). Faure counters
descriptions of Buddhism as a monolithic, patriarchal tradition that has
only recently been recuperated by modern feminists by showing how women
have performed active roles for centuries. At the same time, he asserts that
108 MERIDIANS 13:2
“like most clerical discourses, Buddhism is indeed relentlessly misogynist”
because “attitudes toward women are part of monastic attitudes towards
society and lay people” and because of a fundamental belief in the sinfulness
of female sexuality and gender (9). He recounts the numerous repressive
forms taken by different strains of Buddhism, including “the requirement
for women to be reborn as men before reaching salvation, and the belief
in the radical impurity of female blood” (326).
For Faure, Buddhism’s egalitarian rhetoric has not translated into reality
not only because this discourse has been ignored in practice, but, he
explains, because “gender-neutral” and “gender-free” ideologies may have
male-centric underpinnings in and of themselves. “Despite its theoretical
nondualism,” writes Faure,
Buddhism has tended to read dualistic (and therefore gendered)

distinctions, such as other-worldly (transcendent) and this-worldly
(immanent), as well as mind and body, in terms of sexual difference
. . . the gendered body now belongs to the female side of things (yin),
whereas the “nongendered” mind belongs to the male side (yang). (328)
Despite assertions in Zen Buddhism that it does not matter whether one
is male or female in order to attain enlightenment, women are often
associated with bodily experiences and therefore worldliness. Women’s
entrance to the sangha (or the Buddhist community) means forgetting
their sexual difference as well as their “feminine ‘spirituality,’” but in
practice, spiritualization “usually means masculinization” rather than neutral-
ization or even a spirituality centered on physical, sensory experiences (13).
This paradox of nondual philosophy that Faure describes can also be
seen within modern feminist movements that adopted Zen philosophies
for their political purposes. Dina Lowy traces the rise of twentieth-century
feminist movements in Japan, which coincided with the beginnings of
Buddhist feminist thinking in Asia. The “New Women’s” movement,
Lowy writes, was incited by the “industrialization, modernization, and
Westernization” of Japan in the early 1900s, as well as the importation
of the liberal feminism of the West (Lowy 2007, 2, 16). Lowy argues that
the introduction of Western literature and plays, especially the works of
Henrik Ibsen, sparked discourse that led to the emergence of the Japanese
“New Woman.” Critical discussion of Ibsen’s plays, which feature female
characters who reject traditional gender roles, fed into larger public debates
about the New Woman, women’s place in society, and national identity
in a moment of increased modernization. Although the New Woman,
characterized by her economic independence and sexual openness, was
a decidedly “Western phenomenon,” Japanese women who embraced
Western feminism also brought Buddhist philosophy into these discussions
about the New Woman’s identity.
Hiratsuka Raichō, for example, founding editor of the women’s magazine
Seito, proposed Buddhist thinking as a solution for suffering caused by
patriarchal oppression. Raichō’s reading of Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
is informed by her background as a Zen Buddhist, and in her 1912 letter
to Ibsen’s fictional protagonist, Nora, she advises her to seek freedom
from gender oppression by “throwing away [her] false inner self” (Raichō
1912, 139). She writes: “Dear Nora . . . when you have killed, exhausted all
traces of that being called Nora, won’t that be when you have truly gained
self-awareness? Won’t that be when you become from the depths of your
soul what is truly meant by a New Woman?” (140). Raichō’s letter is striking
not only because she sees the annihilation of the self as a path to gender
equality, but also because, even after the self has been “killed,” the category
of “woman” is left intact. In Raichō’s imagining of enlightenment, Nora
can end her suffering through self-denial, but instead of becoming free
from gender, she is reborn as a “New Woman.” In the accounts raised by
Lowy and Faure, the male/female binary survives in both traditional and
feminist applications of Buddhism’s nondual philosophy.
In A Tale for the Time Being, Nao’s grandmother Jiko moves between
feminist and Buddhist projects and perhaps encapsulates the intersections
and tensions between the two movements. Prior to World War II, Jiko
self-identified as an anarchist, novelist, and a New Woman, who “had
plenty of lovers, both male and female” (Ozeki 2013, 6); however, after her
son kills himself while serving in the war, she “renounce[s] the world”
and becomes a Buddhist nun in order to teach “people how to live in
peace” (180). In her early life, Jiko celebrates her body and her sexuality as
a self-proclaimed New Woman, and like the Euro-American feminist be-
fore her, Japan’s New Woman was considered a threat to national stability
because of her “open sexuality, self-assertion, and unconventional behavior”
(Lowy 2007, 119–20). Later in life, though, Jiko abandons this feminist
identity and grounds her life in Buddhist thought. In a gesture of disowning
her body, she shaves her head and lives out the rest of her days in a temple
110 MERIDIANS 13:2
isolated from society. In a sense, she takes the path that Raichō wished
Ibsen’s Nora had taken: by doing away with her individual identity, she
transcends the suffering caused by social strife.
Initially, this philosophy also appears to work as an answer for Nao’s
troubles, but as the novel progresses, she finds that nondualistic thinking
affords only a limited solution. Nao, who self-identifies as an American
girl and whose perceived “American-ness” and gender are the bases for
her persecution at school, is presented with Buddhist philosophy as a
way out of her suffering. When Nao stays with her grandmother over the
course of a summer, Jiko teaches Nao how to achieve this disembodiment
through zazen meditation. Jiko promises that, through Zen Buddhist
practice, she can develop a supapawa (superpower) that will allow her to
withstand “astonishing amounts of pain” (Ozeki 2013, 204). When Nao is at
the height of her Zen practice, she observes that her skin no longer reacts
to mosquito bites. She says, “There was no difference between me and the
mosquitoes. My skin was no longer a wall that separated us, and my blood
was their blood” (204). With this lack of sensation, this lack of skin, Nao
resembles a machine or cyborg more than a teenage girl with a bruised
body, collapsing traditional binaries by blurring the bounds of her physical
self and identity. No longer confined by classifications of nation and gender,
she experiences a death or end of the body and a oneness with all things.
However, Nao’s ambivalence toward nondualist Buddhist thinking is
expressed when Jiko encourages her to wrestle with the waves. Nao flings
herself into the ocean and kicks and punches each cresting wave until
she collapses, exhausted. Floating in the water, she wonders what would
happen if she submits her body to the tide: “Would I be washed out to sea?
The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my
fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean,
where anemones would grow upon them like flowers” (193). Though she
feels a sense of release through her surrender to the ocean, her fantasy of
being consumed by fish and sharks exposes the tension in her psyche.
The image is at the same time comforting and alarming, and in many ways
encapsulates her conflict throughout the book. She struggles over the ques-
tion of whether to abandon her body or to preserve herself as an individual,
desiring both to transcend the bounds of her body and to protect them.
Moreover, once she leaves the safety of the temple, Nao finds that this
feeling of unity and peace promoted by Buddhist practice is difficult to
maintain as she re-enters society. After her summer with Jiko ends and
Nao returns to her parents’ apartment, she utilizes the “superpower”
cultivated through nondual thinking to cope with her tormentors at school.
When her classmates assault her in the school bathroom, Nao does not
struggle or scream. Her skirt is pulled over her head, and instead of fighting,
she slips into a Zen state of consciousness and feels her face “relax into a
gentle smile” (277). She concludes that her attackers are “just mosquitoes,
buzzing in the distance and bothersome only if you let them be” (277). She
does not perceive the barrier between herself and others. Instead, she
experiences a “zero degree of difference” where sexual violence becomes a
mere annoyance or an illusion.
Although this emptiness and dissolution of ego created through med-
itation affords Nao a unique sense of power—allowing her to dull the
emotional pain of the assault—her response to the attack reveals potential
problems with associating Buddhist thought so readily with feminism.
Nao’s submissive smile allows her to disassociate from the attack, but
simultaneously, she is silenced in the face of violence. In the novel, the
Buddhist response to an attempted rape is passivity and acceptance, showing
how nondualistic philosophy may fundamentally be at odds with feminist
aims to challenge the devaluation of women’s bodies. Counter to the claim
that “Buddhism is feminism,” in this moment of violence Ozeki shows
how the two approaches are in some ways irreconcilable.
Nao finds that nondualistic thinking cannot protect her body from
degradation, but even before the attack, she is not satisfied with Buddhism’s
denial of differences, its lack of walls and separation. Avoiding embodiment
provides her some comfort in the face of gender-based oppression, but
it does not offer her the community and acceptance that she craves. She
wonders if she really wants to “let her body go” (193); she still desires a
sense of “self”: to be recognized as a unique, individual identity, as the one
and only “Nao.” Jiko’s Buddhist feminism allows Nao to enter a gender-free
zone, but at the same time, this elimination of divides does not help her
to foster relationships with others. In fact, the dissolution of the self
also removes any basis she might have to connect with others or to create
the social network that she longs for.
Though Nao has the chance to follow in Jiko’s footsteps and become a
Buddhist nun, we do not see her committing her life to Buddhism at the
end of the novel. She gives up her Buddhist practice, and instead of sitting
112 MERIDIANS 13:2
in meditation, she takes perhaps the opposite course of action than what
Raichō suggests. Rather than “annihilating all traces of the self,” she de-
liberately begins leaving a trace of herself by writing in a journal, recording
the narrative and memories of her life. According to the character Ruth, who
eventually comes to read Nao’s diary, writing functions as the antithesis
of self-annihilation. She observes: “I’ve always thought of writing as the
opposite of suicide . . . writing was about immortality. Defeating death,
or at least forestalling it” (314).
Nao’s act of writing goes against the self-erasure associated with non-
dualistic thinking—showing the teen’s departure from Buddhist feminism
—but her diary-writing is also presented as different from her earlier
attempts at blogging. In fact, Nao even calls her diary an “antiblog” (26).
While she composes, she imagines various people typing alone in their
rooms with no social network; through her writing, however, Nao comes
to forge a relationship with a random reader on the other side of the
world, and of her diary, she concludes: “It’s the opposite of a blog. It’s an
antiblog, because it’s only meant for one special person, and that person
is you” (26).
The you to whom Nao refers is Ruth, a novelist living on the other side
of the Pacific, who comes into contact with the diary when it washes up
on the beach near her home following the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Through
writing and reading, Ruth and Nao forge a transnational kinship, a real
connection in material form through the object of the diary. For Nao, this
transcultural exchange provides answers that she could not find through
the immaterial and disembodied realms created by online forums or
through Buddhist meditation. It is this brand of transnational feminism,
created by Nao and Ruth’s relationship, that the novel offers as an alterna-
tive to both cyber- and Buddhist feminisms.
Transnational Feminism in a Hello Kitty Lunchbox
Nao begins her journal by introducing herself to an imagined reader,

a witness who is willing to listen to her life story (Ozeki 2013, 136, 137).
She pictures a woman with a cat in her lap and writes to her: “It feels
like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve
found it, you’re reaching through time to touch me! . . . It’s like a message
in a bottle, cast out onto the ocean of time and space” (26). What Nao
does not realize is that she has not merely called a fantastical reader into
existence; she writes to an actual woman who receives her message from
across the Pacific. On another meta level, fictional Nao also does not
realize that her reader Ruth has a real-life analog in the form of the novel’s
author. Like Ruth in the novel, Ruth Ozeki is a novelist who lives on an
island off British Columbia, and similar to Ruth, whose husband is an
environmental scientist named Oliver, Ozeki “is married to the German-
Canadian environmental artist Oliver Kellhammer,” according to the
author’s website.
The fictional Ruth discovers Nao’s diary washed up on a beach, packed
inside a Hello Kitty lunch box. When Ruth reads the diary, she recognizes
herself as Nao’s intended reader and says: “She was writing to me. I’m
her you” (344). Though Ruth and Nao never meet in person, they share
and each take turns in producing the book’s narrative progression, with
each section alternating between Nao’s diary entries and Ruth’s response
to them. As Ozeki fictionalizes herself as Ruth, the entanglement between
Ruth and Nao and between the characters and the author becomes even
denser, calling into question whether the author is writing her characters
or if the writing happens the other way around. As Ozeki reports in an
interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, this confusion between fact
and fiction and between narrative voices comes from the author’s “pluralistic
sense of self.” She claims that her works have no single author as her
characters tend to “take over the show”:
In the past, I’ve tried to write in an omniscient voice, but the characters
refuse to cooperate. All Over Creation, for example, a novel whose theme
is our human need for control and omnipotence, should have been
written in a super-omniscient Godlike authorial voice, but one of the
characters refused to comply. She kept referring to herself in the first
person and insisting that she was the narrator, and eventually I had to
cede the role and get out of her way. (Palumbo-Liu 2014)
According to Ozeki, a similar phenomenon takes place in A Tale for the

Time Being, in that the co-narration of Ruth and Nao (and likewise, the in-
terpositions of Ozeki as a figure in the novel) represents an “overt perfor-
mance of [the] Buddhist propositions of interbeing,” which emphasizes
an interdependent, collective identity over an independent self. The
114 MERIDIANS 13:2
narrative, according to the author, is generated from an exchange between
and among fictional characters and the author rather than from a single
authorial voice.
Ruth and Nao’s entanglement spans geographical and temporal distances,
connecting Japan and Canada. At the same time, in the Internet age, the
connection between the two figures would hardly register as unlikely or
unusual. Through online networks, two people on opposite sides of the
globe with no shared affiliation can easily establish a friendship not unlike
Nao and Ruth’s. However, the novel takes pains to distinguish between
the diary and the Internet as mediums for communication. Not only does
Nao refer to her diary as an “antiblog,” but the novel emphasizes the
diary as a physical object, even giving it bodily qualities. Footnotes tell the
reader that the diary is a “stout, compact tome, perhaps a crown octavo,
measuring approx. 5 × 7 ½ inches” (Ozeki 2013, 19) with a “reddish cloth
cover” (20). The cover of the book, which initially housed Marcel Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu, has been “hacked,” according to Nao—its
pages ripped out by a crafter, retooled as a diary, and later purchased by
Nao in a handicraft boutique in Harajuku. For Nao, this hacking provides
an excellent security feature: her tormentors at school would have no
interest in stealing an old book, and unlike her Internet identity, which
is co-opted in the unprotected and public realm of cyberspace, the physi-
cality of the diary allows Nao to preserve some privacy and control over her
narrative. Furthermore, when the diary makes its way into Ruth’s hands,
she sees the book as an extension of Nao’s body. She holds the diary close
to her nose and identifies the smells absorbed into its glue and paper;
she inhales a scent of “bitter coffee beans” and something “sweetly fruity
like shampoo” which she realizes must be Nao. As she examines Nao’s
handwriting, Ruth says that her “eye wasn’t really taking in [the characters’]
meaning as much as a felt sense, murky and emotional, of the writer’s
presence” (12). For Ruth, access to the girl’s handwriting allows for a more
authentic and intimate experience. She analyzes the shifts in the slant
of the writing, changes in density and color, considering how the mood
of the moment affected the grip of the writer’s pen. Following this study,
Ruth attempts to read the undated entries at the same pace at which they
were written, and she concludes: “Print is predictable and impersonal,
conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye.
Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and
is as intimate as skin” (12). Contrasted with the immateriality of cyber-
space, the material object of the diary embodies Nao, bearing her scent, her
shifting moods, her presence across time and space.
The emotional connection fostered through the material object can
be explained by Susan Stewart’s reflections on the souvenir as a referent
for “authenticity.” The diary functions as a souvenir for Ruth, providing
an extension of Nao and the place and time in which she composed within
its covers. According to Stewart, the souvenir comes to stand for authentic
experience because of the way its owner attaches narrative to the object:
“the capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience is, in
fact, exemplified by the souvenir. . . . Through narrative the souvenir
substitutes a context of perpetual consumption for its context of origin.
It represents not the lived experience of its maker but the ‘secondhand’
experience of its possessor/owner” (Stewart 1993, 135). Ruth, then, is not
only moved by Nao’s story; she participates in writing a narrative of her own
(and eventually influencing Nao’s life story as well) through her interactions
with the object. While reading one evening, Ruth feels the warmth of the
cover and knows that the emanating heat has “less to do with the spooky
qualities of the book and everything to do with the climate changes in her
own body” (38). She understands that she has control over the temperature
of the object through her handling of it. In this description, the diary is
not a static object with a fixed narrative but instead functions as a body that
is shaped as much as by its context of origin as by its secondhand owner.
Although Ruth experiences a sense of closeness and a reciprocal sense
of ownership in her reading of the diary, other characters initially respond
to the artifact in the opposite way, with fear and repulsion. The novel
emphasizes ways that Ruth and Nao’s relationship transcends geo-political
borders, and Ruth’s willingness to embrace the foreign artifact is presented
as particularly unique. When Ruth’s neighbors hear about the diary, they
encourage her to turn it in or get rid of it; they warn her about the dangers
of radiation pollution from the tsunami in Japan, and one woman, notably
named “Purity,” expresses anxiety about radiation from foreign lands
contaminating the island’s food. “I don’t want to get cancer and have
deformed babies,” she says (145). Purity’s statement expresses wider fears
about consuming “the Other” or being infiltrated by alien influences, and
her repulsion at Nao’s diary is not unlike the Japanese students’ responses
to Nao when she first enrolls in their school. They never call Nao by her
116 MERIDIANS 13:2
name, only “Transfer Student”—her foreignness is her most salient feature,
and she is forever marked as a “transfer” or outsider (99). Furthermore,
the students fear contagion brought by the foreign body and speculate:
“Maybe Transfer Student has some disgusting American disease.” They
insist that she should be quarantined and call her a germ (100).
Given the unease depicted on both sides of the ocean about invading
cultures and essences, Ruth and Nao’s trans-Pacific bond becomes even
more exceptional. Additionally, Ruth, a middle-aged woman living in the
Americas, and Nao, a teenager residing in Japan, appear to have nothing
in common at first glance other than the fact that they are both females
and writers. For Nao, though, imagining a reader who is also a woman
seems to carry certain significance. When she attempts to picture what
her reader might look like, she considers various possibilities and says:
“Sometimes I hope you’re a man, so you’ll like me because I’m cute, but
sometimes I hope you’re a woman because then there’s a better chance
you’ll understand me” (299). Nao assumes that she would have more in
common with a woman and that a woman would be more sympathetic to
her plight. At the same time, the affinity between Nao and Ruth is not
based in a shared experience of the female body—in fact, the novel seems
well aware of possible problems with assuming a “natural” understanding
between women across borders that is founded in essentialized notions
of femininity.
In Between Woman and Nation, Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo
Moallem argue against a transnational feminism that is based on the
biologist’s view of female identity as tied to the body. In an era of glob-
alization, they warn against the dangers of creating a totalizing vision
—“the simultaneous denial and universalization of difference”—and
the problems presented by notions of a “global sisterhood,” a feminist
discourse that insists on universal “sameness” between women and in-
advertently reinforces hegemonic structures (Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem
1999, 3). They write: “The related notion of ‘global sisterhood’ constructs
an essentialized category of woman through the invention and reinvention
of a globalized woman’s body, leaving the nation undisturbed. Refusing
‘global feminism’ requires questioning the dominance of the nation-state’s
mythic narrativization or representation of itself” (13). In this way, attributing
essential qualities to women across the globe produces a homogeneous
identity that replicates patriarchal ideologies.
In both A Tale for the Time Being and her 1998 novel My Year of Meats,
Ozeki attempts to generate models of transnational feminism while
grappling with both totalizing and essentializing traps. A comparison to
Ozeki’s earlier works shows how the author’s ideas about transnational
feminism have evolved, as the later novel shifts away from or complicates
a monolithic category of “woman.” In her examination of My Year of Meats,
Shameem Black discusses how the author searches for an ideal of cosmo-
politan feminism: “a vision of [a] progressive, feminist global community
. . . in resistance to the individual, patriarchal, and corporate agents that
endanger women’s bodies and attack their sexuality worldwide” (Black
2004, 230). For Black, “the desire for children is one of the most pervasive
themes in the novel, affectively binding together characters across nation-
ality, race, region, sexuality, social class, and religion” (233). The novel
seems to posit the female reproductive body as the starting point for a
shared identity, uniting women of all nations and creeds. However, while
Black sees Ozeki as perpetuating problematic discourses of “biologism
and maternalism”—grounding shared feminine identity in practices of
childbearing and childrearing—she also identifies ways that she questions
these concepts as the characters envision themselves as mothers but not
as wives. Black writes:
Many of the figures within the novel contest patriarchal or conservative

visions of family formation, exploring the richness of childbearing
and childraising within adoptive, multiracial, lesbian, extended, or
nonbiological family units. As My Year of Meats seeks to restore new
feminist readings to the possibilities of female reproduction, the novel
turns the site of childbearing and childrearing into imaginative sites
where transcultural feminist communities begin to cohere. (233)
Ozeki, according to Black, starts to develop an alternate vision of global

feminism, one that is partially based in conceptions of an essentialized
category of woman and a shared experience of the reproductive body, and
yet also resists traditional roles for women and traditional family units.
In A Tale for the Time Being, Ozeki seems to push this vision even further
through her depiction of a bond between women across national bound-
aries that has nothing to do with the reproductive body. Ruth has no
children, and neither Ruth nor Nao expresses a desire or expectation to
reproduce. In fact, though Nao wishes for a fellow woman reader whom
118 MERIDIANS 13:2
she believes will understand her better, ultimately, she decides “that it
doesn’t matter.” She writes: “It’s not such a big deal anyway, male, female.
As far as I’m concerned, sometimes I feel more like one, and sometimes
I feel more like the other, and mostly I feel somewhere in-between, especially
when my hair was first grown back after I’d shaved it” (Ozeki 2013, 299).
Nao voices the nondualistic philosophy that she has learned from her
Buddhist grandmother, but in this moment, her gender identity is expressed
as fluid and shifting (rather than empty or neutral); it exists on a sliding
scale rather than as an absence of difference, whether this absence is created
by fantasies of disembodiment or by essentialized notions of a singular
female body.
Rather than developing an affinity through a shared experience of the
reproductive body, Ruth and Nao are bound together through commonalities
in their life stories, and subsequently, the creative role they play in shaping
each other’s narratives. To use Nao’s language, the knowledge of being
in-between, of not quite belonging, sets up the conditions for Ruth and
Nao to forge a transcultural exchange. Though Ruth’s life is far more com-
fortable than Nao’s—with a stable home, a supportive husband, and a
cat companion—she relates to Nao’s writing about isolation. Confined to
the secluded island where her husband works, Ruth misses companionship
and her former life in New York City. Away from home and in a strange
place, she feels that her life is “passing her by,” but when she reads Nao’s
diary, she experiences a “jolt of recognition” (63). As different as their lives
and histories are, they find each other based on their parallel experiences
of feeling “outside” or peripheral to their respective communities.
Later in the novel, in a dream-like state, Ruth searches for Nao in the
mirror, which is a “logical place” for her (348). In nearly every encounter
in the novel, Nao is presented as “other,” foreign, strange, and unwelcome,
but in this moment, even though Ruth and Nao are separated by time and
space, they are seen as analogs, reflections of each other. This sense of inti-
macy, which Nao is unable to find in the virtual realms created by the Internet
and Zen meditation, is facilitated through interactions with the material
object of Nao’s diary—an interaction that allows both the writer and reader
to participate in narrative creation. Because Ruth is able to empathize with
Nao’s predicament, feeling her loneliness as though it were her own, she
urgently wants to protect the girl from danger. At the end of the novel, Nao
resolves that the only way out of her troubles is to kill herself and writes
of her decision in her diary. However, in another fantastical turn, after
Ruth reads Nao’s diary, she is able to intervene in her suicide plans and
saves her life. Through the power of their bond, Ruth is able not only to
passively read Nao’s diary but to actively cooperate in writing her life.
Compared with the other models of feminism presented by Ozeki, from
cyber- to Buddhist feminism and the transnational feminism of My Year
of Meats, Ruth and Nao’s feminist bond stands apart in that it emphasizes
community while maintaining conceptions of “self” and “other.” It allows
for connection across national, cultural, and spatial boundaries but does
not require a denial of differences between them. Instead, Ruth and Nao
form a connection that is not based on essentialized notions of the body
on the one hand or on a rejection of physicality on the other; instead, they
meet because of a shared need for understanding and community, conveyed
through the material object of the diary. Just as she has the power to call
a reader into existence from across the ocean, her reader, Ruth, has the
power to participate in creating or writing Nao’s life. Ruth and Nao’s
transnational relationship represents a process of mutual co-creation, a
model of feminism that emphasizes intermingling and interdependence
over nondualism or a unitary form of identity.
Throughout A Tale for the Time Being, Nao navigates through different
feminist ideologies, seeking an identity that will provide her with a sense
of community and also free her from the abuse and harassment that she
endures at school. As she plays with different identities, she learns that
old power hierarchies can crystallize even in supposedly immaterial realms.
Some theorists of the Internet describe cyberspace as a post-racial and
post-gender dimension because it leaves the material body behind, and
Buddhist feminists sometimes equate nondualism with equality. Yet just
as Nao’s online identity does not free her from the tyranny of patriarchal
systems, Nao’s efforts to transcend the limits of the body through Zen
meditation also do not exempt her from social oppression. Additionally,
the novel shows the potential harmful effects of denying difference in the
face of discrimination and how this silences minorities from speaking
against inequality. It emphasizes a form of communal identity that does
not deny or smooth over difference or assume a shared identity that is
anchored to gendered conceptions of the body.
Returning to Nao’s metaphor of “a little wave person, floating around
on the stormy sea of life,” at the end of the book, Nao can still be seen as
120 MERIDIANS 13:2
a wave but perhaps in a different light. She is not an isolated wave adrift
on stormy waters, nor is she as boundless and shapeless as the churning
waters of the sea. Rather than surrendering her body to the ocean, allowing
sharks and little fish to consume her bones, annihilating any traces of her
individual ego, she holds onto her ideas of selfhood. At the same time,
Ozeki does not present Nao as a coherent entity with firm boundaries.
Instead, she is an individual wave in the ocean, simultaneously dual and
nondual, never apart from the ocean, connected and fluid, and yet main-
taining her own shape and agency.
NOTE
1. Nao laments that her American diet has made her too big and that her school
uniform does not fit her the way it fits her Japanese peers: “The other girls in
my eighth-grade class were petite and managed to look super-cute and sexy in
their uniforms, but I looked like a big old stinky lump, and I felt like one too”
(Ozeki 2013, 46).
WORKS CITED
Associated Press (AP). 2015. “Author Ruth Ozeki merges Zen Buddhism and Story-
telling.” The National, March 14. http://www.thenational.ae/arts lifestyle/writers
/author-ruth-ozeki-merges-zen-buddhism-and-storytelling (accessed October
23, 2015).
Becker, Barbara. 2000. “Cyborgs, Agents, and Transhumanists: Crossing Traditional
Borders of Body and Identity in the Context of New Technology.” Leonardo 33,
no. 5: 361–65.
Black, Shameem. 2004. “Fertile Cosmofeminism: Ruth L. Ozeki and Transnational
Reproduction.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 5, no. 1: 226–56.
Boucher, Sandy. 1988. Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism.
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Byrne, Jean. 2012. “Why I am Not a Buddhist Feminist: A Critical Examination of
‘Buddhist Feminism.’” Feminist Theology 21, no. 2: 180–94.
Daniels, Jessie. 2009. “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodi-
ment.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 37, nos. 1, 2: 101–124.
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Gross, Rita. 1981. “Feminism from the Perspective of Buddhist Practice.” Buddhist–
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———. 2005. “How American Women Are Changing Buddhism.” Shambhala Sun. http://
www.lionsroar.com/how-american-women-are-changingbuddhism/# (accessed
May 15, 2015).
Hansen, Mark B. N. 2006. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. New York:
Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist
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Kaplan, Karen, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, eds. 1999. Introduction to
Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marlo Starr is a PhD student in English at Emory University. Her research
interests include issues of identity, belonging, and cultural myth in
twentieth-century transnational and postcolonial literatures. Her creative
work has appeared in The Atlas Review and is forthcoming from Monkeybicycle.
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Zen Cyber and Transnational Feminisms

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Beyond Machine Dreams: Zen, Cyber-, and Transnational Feminisms in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale

for the Time Being

Beyond Machine Dreams: Zen,

Nao Yasutani is not sure if she wants to live. The sixteen-year-old

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 13, no. 2 (2016): 99–122.

Postmodern Visions of Equality

As they are presented in the novel, digital communication and Buddhist

100 MERIDIANS 13:2

M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 101

At ﬁrst glance, cyberfeminists and Buddhist feminists alike might ﬁnd a

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Following the entrance of Haraway’s cyborg, feminist thinkers have contin-

M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 103

According to Turkle, networked life creates an illusion of connection that

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In her description, Nao overlays olfactory sensation onto digital pixels,

Chosen identities enabled by technology . . . are not breaking the mold

M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 105

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“My skin was no longer a wall that separated us”:

M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 107

Once involved in Buddhist practice, [American women] ﬁnd themselves

For Boucher, women have taken advantage of Buddhism’s recent rise in

108 MERIDIANS 13:2

Buddhism has tended to read dualistic (and therefore gendered)

M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 109

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M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 111

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Transnational Feminism in a Hello Kitty Lunchbox

Nao begins her journal by introducing herself to an imagined reader,

M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 113

According to Ozeki, a similar phenomenon takes place in A Tale for the

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M ARLO S TARR • B EYOND M ACHINE D REAMS 115

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Many of the ﬁgures within the novel contest patriarchal or conservative

Ozeki, according to Black, starts to develop an alternate vision of global

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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