A Tale for the Time Being

I liken the 16-year-old narrator, Naoko, to Holden Caulfield: caustic, but with profound insights; witty, but tortured. Her voicing brought levity and humor to really big themes of trauma and love and loss; quantum mechanics and time and the multiverse.... Don't miss this one. Witty, moving, profound. If you also love ambiguous endings because life is, well...ambiguous...this one will also hit all the right notes.

Ruth Ozeki is one of those writers I believe I’ll be reading closely for a long time. I read My Year of Meats a few years ago and was absolutely astonished by what that book accomplished, and this book continued that trend. Ozeki managed to weave together a tale with mystery elements that captured the uncanny realities of planetary connections.

I was also absolutely astonished by how unforced the style was when Ozeki bounced between the two main characters of the book. The overlaps between the two characters felt utterly natural and vividly described on the page despite being separated… show more.

On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on a beach.

Tucked inside is the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl. Ruth, the auto-fictional protagonist of this novel, is a writer who finds the lunchbox and suspects it’s debris from Japan’s 2011 tsunami. Thus ensues a dual storyline in which each of these characters seeks out the other and, in the process, reckons with family, fate, and ancestral heritage.

I chose this National Book Award finalist from 2014 for its subtle use of the two main characters liminal realities to wrestle with the possibility… show more.

I think it’s the struggles and painful experiences of the 16-year-old character Nao, that kept my attention throughout this twisty-turning book. The author takes you right into Nao’s young mind. Why is it that no matter where you are in the world, being a teenager comes with such difficulty? Nao’s life was brutal on all counts, except for her relationship with her great-grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun living in a remote monastery. The Japanese cultural context of this book is quite fascinating, and offers much to learn. On a personal level, I could relate to the loving, rather extraordinary relationship… show more.

This one is “meta-fiction,” a fascinating concept to me, in which the author becomes one of the characters. Also, it’s about parallel universes, which is a sister to time travel, right? I loved getting lost in the story of Ruth, the American novelist who discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox containing the diary of Nao, a Japanese teenager who writes about her own grandmother’s life. A sweet, lovely way to think about women between generations, and what we want to keep. 

There are two families at the heart of Ruth Ozeki’s wondrous novel, which makes sense, given the story has two different timelines. In one, is teenage Nao, whose struggles with her suicidal father and her connection with her wise and funny great grandmother are documented in a diary, which is picked up in the second timeline by Ruth, an author struggling to write a novel who becomes entranced by Nao’s diary which seems to have a whole life and character of its own. Surreal and gripping, A Tale for the Time Being is about the past and future, and about… show more.