Starling Days & Ruth Ozeki and the zen hybrid novel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many years ago, I started to collect books by mixed race writers. It was an attempt to understand the stories of people like me. Yet often, they were nothing like me. The only thing we had in common was that we didn’t quite belong in any other category. Some emphasized their sense of separation or of broken identity. Others described how they found links between nationalities and cultures. This thesis is comprised of a novel about characters uneasy in the categories into which they are assigned and a critical essay on how Ruth Ozeki in A Tale for the Time Being uses Zen Buddhism to describe a deeply connected hybrid self. \n \nPart 1: Starling Days, a novel Starling Days opens on the George Washington Bridge. Mina is staring into the water when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she’s not about to jump but they don’t believe her. \nThe novel explores the aftermath of this moment. In search of peace, Mina and her husband, Oscar, move to London. An adjunct classics professor, Mina tries to understand her failing mental health through mythology, gynecology, and her memories of her Chinese grandmother. Oscar’s ability to care for her weakens as family and work begin to pressure him. As the narrative and their relationship fragment the text explores the concept of self, the taboos of mental health and the trials of holding a family together when you cannot hold onto yourself. \n \nPart 2: Ruth Ozeki and the Zen Hybrid Novel “Ruth Ozeki and the Zen Hybrid Novel” examines how one writer uses Zen philosophy to navigate the hybridity in her work. Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being, models a hybridity based in the Buddhist theory of interconnectedness. Ozeki is a Japanese Caucasian American woman living in Canada and A Tale for the Time Being is set in Canada and Japan. Both Zen and hybridity appear in every level of the novel—setting, character, form, and linguistic play. \nFirst the thesis explores the history of the I-novel as a reaction to the influx of American and European forces into Japan. It then examines how Ozeki combines the I-novel with metafiction and how Ozeki uses Zen Buddhism to bridge seemingly disparate senses of self. Finally, it argues that the Zen employed by Ozeki is a hybrid Zen that draws on both Japanese and American influences distinct from a historically more nationalistic Zen. This hybrid Zen holds the book together form the way she uses individual hybrid words like ‘supapawa’ all the way out to the epitext of the promotional video.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".