Getting this collection of short stories off to an appropriate start, the first story features “the typing lady,” someone the narrator observes typing in the library. The typing lady is described as “nondescript: oldish, in her fifties or sixties, Asian-looking, with black-framed glasses and gray-streaked hair,” so you know right away the narrator is describing the author. And the narrator later learns that the typing lady is an author and she goes to her book launch event. In the most appealing way, the author intrudes and says the key is our own stories, “about how, when we read a story, we bring our own lives to bear on it and make it ours, no matter what the writer might have intended.”
The narrator of the second story is the son of an anthropologist in academia who all, according to the narrator, married Asian women. This one was less appealing and left me thinking that some actions of the son seemed unlikely for a kid his age. Perhaps when a story begins with the absurd take about anthropologists in academia, one should not expect characters to follow expectations. On the other hand Ozeki herself is the daughter of anthropology scholar and a Japanese mother.
One long story tells about a woman who made her way marginally employed in technical writing and helping the elderly couple who rent to her. The title is “Leafblower,” referring to the loud noise that the Lawn Kings, employed next door for yard care make. One aspect she describes here is especially annoying. “This is as far as she gets before the leaf blower starts up again. She hears the gas engine fire and the throbbing vroom vroom vroom as the operator fingers the throttle. He’s enjoying that, she thinks. Fucker.” I identify with that because lawn care next door is done by someone who throttles as if he’s on a motorcycle getting ready to take off.
When two pre-teen friends are tasked with displaying compassion and writing about it for a school project, we see several misguided projects and times when they are far from compassionate. It looks a bit different when the dominant friend’s family splits up and the cold-hearted Meghan needs compassion. The other friend says she has forgotten most of the story and as she authors stories, poems, she does remember the connection between them, their inventiveness and being sad when their friendship ended.
And on we go….some stories have interesting or funny bits but as a whole are mystifying. And some are completely mystifying to me from beginning to end. The author stepping outside herself and writing about the person she observed came up more than once.
Ruth Ozeki, The Typing Lady, Viking, 2026, 321 pages (I read the Kindle version). Available in the public library.