Full of Ozeki’s signature humor 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. 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. 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.

A diary is Nao’s only solace-and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.

But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. Indeed.A brilliant, unforgettable, and long-awaited novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki “A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.” In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. Instead the book rather drifts off into thoughts of multiple worlds and the notion that not-knowing is good because it allows for lots of possibilities. There’s warmth, wit and wisdom within the book, but I’d somehow hoped for a particularly new and revelatory nugget at the end. (Phew!) Elsewhere, Ruth declares herself to feel a ‘sense of kinship with this woman from another time and place, engaged in self-revelatory, self-concealing and self-effacing acts’. (It’s his watch and letters in the Hello Kitty lunchbox.)Īnd aha! It turns out I wasn’t so far off track, for the watch is set ticking and a Japanese Jungle Crow turns up on Ruth’s island and is obviously the reincarnation of the kamikaze pilot who leads Ruth, by dream, to Tiko’s temple.

(Eastern and Western attitudes to suicide - honour or shame - are impressively explored.) Emotional and spiritual rescue for Nao comes from spending time in her 104-year-old great-grandmother Tiko’s temple where she learns about the lives of her ancestors, including an uncle who was a kamikaze pilot.

Her father keeps trying to commit suicide. The bullying she endures at school is close to torture. Brought up in America, Nao’s Japanese father loses his job in Silicon Valley and she’s taken to Tokyo. Ruth’s sections can become a bit tedious, whereas Nao’s diary is unfailingly vivid, dramatic, sassy and moving.

A tale for the timebeing