Praise for All Over Creation
‘Highly original’
Daily Mail
‘Captivating . . . Ozeki joins the constellation of such environmentally aware writers as Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx and Margaret Atwood, bringing her own shrewd and playful humour, luscious sexiness and kinetic pizzazz . . . a busy, darkly humorous and cunningly entertaining novel, weaving canny psychological insights into each twist in her purposeful yet anarchically tinged plot’
Chicago Tribune
‘Amusing, moving and delicately controlled’
Big Issue
‘A sprawling, good-hearted story about friendship, family discord, reconciliation and the slow, creative process of social change’
USA Today
‘A well-crafted, often comic story of the personal and political’
Observer
‘A nice blend of humour and strangely affecting optimism. Ozeki has written a book where dread and hope coexist. Neither is given short shrift or magicked away’
New York Times
Praise for My Year of Meat
‘Smart, funny, irreverent’
Guardian
‘A sensitive and compelling portrait of two modern women’
Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha
‘A meaty first novel about relationships, cultural boundaries and the beef industry. Ozeki masks a deeper purpose with a light tone . . . delightful’
Jane Smiley
‘A wacky combination of love story and exposé . . . marvellously funny and passionate, this had me laughing out loud and engrossed to the end’
Literary Review
‘Original, genuinely funny and mighty strange . . . provocative, smart and makes you wary of biting into anything that hasn’t actually grown in soil’
Maureen Lipman
‘A jalopy of a book whose various bits seemed tied together with baling wire’
New York Times
‘Highly original and gripping’
Daily Mail
ALL
OVER
CREATION
Ruth Ozeki graduated from Smith College, Massachusetts with degrees in English literature and Asian studies, then received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship and emigrated to Japan to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature. She has worked in film and television and has made her own films, two of which have received awards, festival recognition and international distribution.
All Over Creation is Ruth’s second novel. Her first novel, My Year of Meat, is also published by Picador. She divides her time between New York City and British Columbia.
ALSO BY RUTH OZEKI
My Year of Meat
This edition published by Canongate Books in 2013
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Ruth L. Ozeki 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published 2003 by Penguin Putnam, Inc., New York, USA
Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 117 7
To my father,
who was always kind
Contents
first
Esto Perpetua
(“May It Be Forever”)
—Idaho state motto
in the beginning
It starts with the earth. How can it not? Imagine the planet like a split peach, whose pit forms the core, whose flesh its mantle, and whose fuzzy skin its crust—no, that doesn’t do justice to the crust, which is, after all, where all of life takes place. The earth’s crust must be more like the rind of the orange, thicker and more durable, quite unlike the thin skin of a bruisable peach. Or is it? Funny, how you never think to wonder.
