Ozeki masterfully develops the two parallel stories, creating a virtual dialogue between the blocked writer and the diarist, who confides, “I’m reaching forward through time to touch you.” Ruth’s and Nao’s struggles to find meaning in their lives draw on everything from mythology and Japanese history to quantum physics and European culture. ’A Tale for the Time Being’ by Ruth Ozeki (Viking. So she immerses herself in Nao’s diary and searches obsessively online for clues about the girl’s family and their ultimate fate. She can’t finish the book she’s been working on for years. She loves Oliver, but she misses the bustling life in New York City that she left to join him on this remote island (its gossipy, small-town atmosphere is nicely rendered by Ozeki). Ruth understands those feelings of dislocation and loss. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as naked or alone.” “There was nobody left in my life I could count on to keep me safe. Her mother, the overstressed family breadwinner, haplessly suggested she join an after-school club. Her father, jobless and ashamed of his inability to protect Nao from her classmates’ bullying, repeatedly attempted to kill himself. When the dot-com bust sent them back to Tokyo, she found herself an outcast in junior high. We learn from the diary that Nao spent her childhood in California, where her father was a computer programmer. Ruth is more concerned with Nao’s implicit suicide threat. Perhaps, he thinks, it’s part of the debris flow from the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Ruth’s husband, Oliver, is excited by the idea that this package floated from Tokyo all the way to where they live, on an island off British Columbia. We soon learn that an American novelist named Ruth has found Nao’s diary on the beach in a plastic-wrapped Hello Kitty lunchbox that also contains a batch of old letters. happens to be the diary of my last days on earth.”
“A time being is someone who lives in time.” But Nao plans “to drop out of time. . . “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being,” writes a funny, unhappy 16-year-old girl. From the first page of “ A Tale for the Time Being,” Ozeki plunges us into a tantalizing narration that brandishes mysteries to be solved and ideas to be explored. As contemporary as a Japanese teenager’s slang but as ageless as a Zen koan, Ruth Ozeki’s new novel combines great storytelling with a probing investigation into the purpose of existence.
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