Quantum Narratives and Zen Moments: Thinking Nuclear Pasts and Futures After Fukushima

Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being is a transnational, multigenerational narrative of catastrophe and its personal, philosophical, and environmental impact. This chapter examines the novel’s engagement with the Fukushima nuclear disaster through its fluid treatment of time, the possibility of alternate timelines, and quantum physics as a Zen concept. In Ozeki’s novel, traditional, linear narrativity is shown to be insufficient to grapple with the impacts of disasters like Fukushima and the more nebulous but no less disastrous phenomenon of the global climate crisis. Instead, Ozeki experiments with alternate modes of narration that emphasize a variety of other-than-human agencies. Following Karen Barad, the analysis approaches Ozeki’s novel diffractively, reading the nuclear disaster through the various lenses of algorithmic thinking, Zen Buddhism, and quantum physics that are introduced in the novel as ways of working through incomprehensible loss. The novel models a paradoxical approach to thinking the nuclear future—both mournful and defiant, paralyzed and unrelentingly active. Ozeki’s quantum poetics embodies an approach that confronts the unknowability of the future as well as the past.