“A Tale for the Time Being”

Monday, 05 May 2014 16:47

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Once again, the American Library Association’s Notable Books list led me to a book I hadn’t heard much about –“A Tale for the Time Being” by Ruth Ozeki. In reading through reviews, I’ve come to realize that plenty of people were talking about it, and I’d missed it somehow.

 Ozeki created this novel in two strands. One is a diary kept by a girl in Japan early in the twenty-first century, the other a third person narrative about an author named Ruth who finds that diary, washed up on the Pacific short in Canada, along with some letters and a watch, all kept dry in a Hello Kitty lunchbox wrapped in plastic bags.

 The girl, Nao, says she intends to write the story of her remarkable 104-year-old great grandmother, a Zen Buddhist nun. Instead she writes primarily about herself, and much more harrowing, about how she’s bullied at school to the point of rape. Nao is no angel, but neither should a young person know such isolation, or regard suicide as a reasonable response.

 Ruth becomes more and more pulled in as she slowly reads Nao’s story. Even though she realizes that years have passed since Nao wrote the diary, she feels an urgent need to communicate to someone that Nao may be a danger to herself. Ruth had developed writer’s block while working on a memoir, and Nao’s story seems to the fill the void it left. The life Ruth and her artist husband have chosen, on an island with barely 50 other people and crazy weather, contrasts vividly with Nao’s life in Tokyo.

 Contrasts propel both the action and the ideas. The contrast between Ruth and Nao. The contrasts between Nao’s previous happy life in California, her sad life in Tokyo, her great-grandmother’s life as a nun and her late uncle’s life as a kamikaze. The contrast between the tiny population of Ruth’s island with the number of times people drop in on her. The contrast between what people initially think of each other, and what they later learn. The contrasts between ideas of time, mortality, love, cruelty, and suffering.

 Ozeki successfully creates a whole of these parts. Nao introduces big ideas despite her youth and apparent failure at school. Ruth and her husband reasonably discuss and build on those ideas as they work their way through the diary. Ozeki creates an energetic young person’s voice as effectively as she describes the married life of two introverted artists. Ozeki’s willingness to explore the despair wrought by bullying and isolation intensified the entire novel. While I sensed the action beginning to fizzle as I neared the conclusion, that’s more a quibble than a problem.

 I recommend this generally to people who enjoy literary fiction. I certainly recommend it to book groups. The novel struck me as an extended conversation between people who’d never met each other, and I sense that there’s plenty here for readers to keep that conversation going.