Living on the Margins with Ruth Ozeki

For several months after Ruth Ozeki’s father died in 1998, she began hearing his voice calling her name. She’d be typing or folding the laundry, and she’d turn to look for him. He wasn’t there. “It was startling whenever it happened,” she recalls, “and also comforting.” It was painful, as well.

“I’d remember he was dead and feel a rush of sadness, like I was losing him again,” says Ozeki, 65, speaking over Zoom from her home in Northampton, Mass.

This haunting experience offered the germ of the idea for Ozeki’s fourth novel, —out in late September from Viking. It follows Benny, a mixed-race teenager who begins to hear voices after his Japanese father dies. At first he hears the voice of his dead father. Then he begins to hear the