Ruth Ozeki - A Tale for The Time Being

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

Comment: This book got on my radar because it was one of the chosen titles of a book club I used to

be part of. I only joined the group later on but the comments about this book were many and I liked what people said. I added it to my pile but it has been around 5 years already... still better late than ever.

This is the story of Nao, a young American girl whose Japanese parents had to go back to Japan after Nao's father lost his job. These three people have little to do with Japanese culture but they are forced to go back anyway. 

When the story begins, Nao introduces herself and starts telling her story.

There's a second main character, a grown up woman called Ruth, who lives in Cortes Island, north to Vancouver. After the 2011 tsunami in Japan, many people lost everything and some debris has ended on the other side of the Pacific and this is when Ruth discovers something in the beach. Later on, while talking to her husband, they realize it's a bunch of papers and a diary, which Ruth starts reading. And so, the two tales connect and slowly, we start seeing what was really going on with Ruth and Nao's lives...

This is a very intense story of dual narrators. We have Nao's story, which we get from her own POV and also Ruth's side of things, which we read in third person.

I'm not certain why the author chose to force us to connect with Nao so promptly and not with Ruth but for me this barely mattered because the story was very powerful.

Nao is a young girl that saw her whole change in the blink of an eye. She is facing many complicated moments because her father can't find a job and is severely depressed to the point of trying to commit suicide. Nao's mother seems to be more absent in how important she could be to the story but it's Nao herself that is the key of everything. She is a very sad, lonely girl who gets bullied at school and through her fear and the terrible things she endures, we see glimpses of a wonderfully bright girl who just can't seem to get enough. 

I found Nao's sections to be amazingly poignant, but also difficult to go through at times. It's really unbearable to think about the pain, the suffering, the humiliations people everywhere face daily and we simply won't know...

Nao has a very peculiar family history and one summer she gets to stay at a temple with her nun great grandmother Jiko, who teaches her a lot, especially about her son Haruki, one of the kamikaze pilots during WWII. These details were deeply researched, I could tell, and were very emotional. In fact, if there is one word I could use to describe the book is emotional because in almost every page there is a detail, a sentence, a scene that just grabs you and won't let go.

Ruth's sections were also interesting to read for me although I've read some readers saying it wasn't so for them, but I liked how more mundane Ruths life appeared to be, even if she lived in a sort of isolated island with her husband who we get also suffers from some mild mental disorder. Ruth is novelist whose memory is being affected so I got the notion she didn't mind the isolation although we can tell she hates it at times. Still, there was a lot to take in by reading through Ruth's perspective and I liked how she tried to know more about Nao and even tried to help her any way she could, despite the time and distance.

Along with philosophical discussions and quantic presentations, the reader slowly unravel what is really happening to both Nao and Ruth and the lessons they learn as they get to communicate with one another: Ruth by reading Nao's diary and Nao by writing it to someone out there.

I liked this style, it was very interesting to know little things at a time about both main characters and their lives and hopes.

This could be described as a complex plot because there's a lot of information included which isn't that easy to follow but it does make the story richer.

Closer to the end, things reach their peak and I confess I was very worried about Nao. It's never that obvious to the reader if Nao is alive at the end or not but the journey towards the last chapter is so emotional like I said, to full of amazing thoughts, I just loved the experience of reading this book.

Grade: 9/10