Ruth Ozeki

Here’s a thought: If I were a Christian, you would be my God.

She was kind of wacky, and I was beginning to like her.

inside of my nose started to prickle.

“Yes,” she agreed. “It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you’re angry. I don’t need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that.”

“So why did you ask?”

Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me. “I asked for you,” she said.

“For me?”

“So you could hear the answer.”

Jiko said it freaked Haruki out, too, because he was a peaceful boy.

fact, she said she had lots of fishes, some that were small like sardines, some that were medium-sized like carp, and other ones that were as big as a bluefin tuna, but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki #1, and it was more like the size of a whale.

Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely.

I really like that.

I’d gotten plenty of practice at school imagining this kind of thing happening to my own body so it didn’t bother me that much, but the idea of someone hurting my old Jiko was brand new to my mind, and it made me feel like throwing up.

I was trying to calculate my chances of fighting off a dozen yanki bitches with serious sticks, when all I had was my pathetic little supapawa!

“Bad girls. Juvenile delinquents. They were saying stuff. I thought they were going to beat us up.”

“Oh no,” Jiko said, shaking her head. “They were all dressed so nicely. Such cheerful colors.”