"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. 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. A diary is Nao's only solace-and will touch lives in 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 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."
First let me state, that I have never read a Ruth Ozeki novel before. Having worked in a book store for the past 5 years, I don't recall ever even seeing her books on our shelves. I took a gamble with this one. The Manager at my store reads a LOT. She always gets to books before anyone else can, and I feel sometimes, that it's hard for my co-workers and myself, to read these books after her and claim them as good as she does. When I saw this book come in, the cover caught my eye. While you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, being a Graphic Designer myself, I know that book designers out there are doing a much better job on the cover designs. So I decided to give it a shot, hoping that if it was excellent, I would have found the next great book before my manager did. So there was a bit of an underlying scheme I had other then reading a good book.
The novel starts out with one of our main characters, Ruth, whom I feel may be an alter-ego to our author, finding an object in a large plastic bag on the beach. Ruth lives on a very remote island off the coast of BC - Whaletown. Thinking it is garbage washed up from the ocean, she brings it home to throw away. Her husband, Oliver, being the curious person he is, decides to open it. The contents of the bag are a Hello Kitty lunchbox, inside the diary of a young Japanese teenager, Nao, and the french diary of her great uncle, Haruki #1, who was a kamikaze pilot in the Second World War. Ruth begins her journey of reading Nao's diary and trying to figure out the fate of Nao, as her diary was written in 2001. Nao, without directly saying the words, is suicidal while writing her diary, and with the tsunami of 2011, Ruth does not now what may have happened to Nao.
With alternating chapters between Ruth, and Nao, we learn the story of Nao's Great-Grandmother Jiko, who became a Buddhist Nun after the second world war when her only son Haruki #1 was killed. Nao gives us some insight into her being bullied in school, having been raised in California in an American school. Her father is let go from his great job in the tech industry, and the family must move back to Japan. Having let his family down, Haruki #2, Nao's father, feels great shame and is also suicidal. Ruth embarks on a journey to track down Nao and her family anyway she can. After multiple Internet searches, she continues to come up empty handed on any information of the family. She decides to reach out to an old friend of a colleague, whom she figures must have known Nao's father while they were living in the United States. Ruth tries searches for tsunami victims with no results. She has Haruki #1's french diary translated to better learn of the family.
This book did pull me in right away. I find I'm more interested when the chapters go back and forth between multiple characters, and I also enjoy reading diary-style novels, so this one hit 2 birds with one stone for me. While the story became in-depth and we discovered more, throughout most of the book I felt as though there wasn't a whole lot happening. Until I got to the end. Everything unfolds and we catch up to Nao and her family. The book finishes with some unanswered questions, but I felt very content with the way it left off. There's nothing I dislike more then when a book leaves so many loose ends, with no indication of a sequel. So when this one ended I felt very at peace with the story just told to me.
To me, this book hit everything I like. Ruth's mother died of Alzheimer's, while it doesn't go into it much, it's still there. Alzheimer's is close to me, so I liked that aspect. Nao's great uncle fought in WWII, in which I have a strong interest. Her great-grandmother is a Buddhist nun, Buddhism is always something I've found fascinating. Like I said, I enjoy multiple person narrative and journal entry novels. Her father is a great mind in the Internet and tech industry, and in the end, we are even thrown into quantum physics and alternate universes, which is oddly, something I think about quite often. I really enjoyed this story, and definitely will be looking into Ozeki's other novels.