Ruth Ozeki
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki unfolds in two parallel lines. It opens with Nao, a Japanese American teenager who has been transplanted from Silicon Valley back to Japan when her father loses his job. Nao is sixteen years old and is thoroughly miserable. She is bullied mercilessly at school, ostracized for being a Japanese American, worries about her suicidal father, and contemplates her own potential suicide. She writes her thoughts in a diary which she hides inside the covers of a volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Somehow the diary washes up in a Hello Kitty lunchbox on an island in British Columbia.
Ruth, a Japanese American writer who lives with her husband on the island, stumbles on the lunchbox. Her husband suspects it arrived on the throes of the tsunami. Ruth begins to decipher its contents, which include Nao’s diary and old letters from Nao’s great uncle, a Kamikaze pilot during World War II. His letters are addressed to Jiko, his mother and Nao’s great grandmother, a 105-year-old former anarchist now turned a Zen Buddhist nun.
The parallel threads alternate between Nao’s dairy and Ruth’s life on the island. Nao describes the punches, bruises, and sadistic bullying she experiences in the hands of her Japanese classmates. Severely depressed during the school year, she experiences transformation and spiritual growth the summer she spends with her great grandmother in the Buddhist monastery. There she learns to empty her mind, breathe fresh air, meditate, and scrub the dead skin off great grandmother’s back.
Meanwhile, Ruth struggles with writer’s block and with the challenges of living on an island beset with severe storms and frequent power cuts. She paces herself as she reads Nao’s diary and scours the internet to learn about Nao, her father, and her anarchist great grandmother.
The novel’s strength lies primarily in the Nao sections. Nao’s teenage voice is unique and authentic. She is irreverent, funny, articulate, and intelligent. Her story is compelling; her description of the abuse she experiences at the hands of her classmates is heart-breaking. Her sections keep the novel afloat, unlike the Ruth sections which tend to drag and have little content.
The novel is a hodgepodge. As the parallel threads unfold, Ozeki peppers the narrative with Zen Buddhism; Ruth’s attempts to decipher the documents in the lunchbox; interactions with a mysterious crow visitor to the island; bizarre happenings in which words disappear from the page; Nao’s halting conversations with her great uncle’s ghost; Ruth’s long dream sequence; alternative realities opening up different possibilities; parallel threads across time and space which seem to merge; Japanese phrases translated in copious footnotes. And to conclude it all, she includes a lecture on quantum mechanics.
A potpourri of a novel that plays with the concept of time, blurring the lines between the past and the present, reality and illusion, the here and the now, and with smatterings of Zen Buddhism thrown in for good measure.