A Tale for the Time Being: A Journey Through Time and Space in a Captivating Novel

mary: Complex and very interesting story

Canada on Nov 25, 2023

DJ: “If you’ve ever tried to keep a diary, then you’ll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction. It’s hopeless, really.” (p104)

One summer when I was teaching high school, the staff and students all read Mitch Albom’s “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” to prepare for the upcoming school year. We collectively discerned that the book’s message is that we are all connected; we used it as an organizing theme for the school year that followed.

“A Tale for the Time Being” is a very different story, but it explores the same theme: it’s a thoughtful, interesting, enjoyable reflection on the idea that we are all, indeed, connected to each other across time and space. It’s a little uneven in places – occasionally contrived and simplistic – and the intended scope might be a bit too ambitious. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: you’ll like the story, identify with the characters, relish the mysteries, and finish with...

United States on Oct 30, 2023

Kindle Customer: The book is very well written.The plot is interwoven with Buddhism and psychology.In fact the story seems to be over when Nao is waiting at the station.However the positive twist given by author is not only encouraging it also lifts the mood.In short a well written book and it was a pleasure to read it.

India on Jun 25, 2023

Cheryl: This was a very different book to anything I have read before. I have now read a few Japanese books and they are all quite unique (which doesn’t sound very unique!) They are all odd I suppose I mean, but in a good way.

This book really drew me in from the start, the writing was original and it made me pay attention. We have a young girl (16 years of age, Nao) who is writing a diary and then we have an older woman (maybe middle aged, Ruth) who is reading the girl’s diary many years later. We alternate between the girl's diary as it is written and the response from Ruth in the present day reading it.

It felt intense and real, as if the girl really was pouring her heart out onto the page. She had a nice writing style, honest and a slightly odd tone, very conversational, it was sad but intriguing. I founds myself really liking both of these women, they were great characters with lots of depth to them.

I have to mention that there are LOTS of disturbing themes here; suicide, war, assault, rape, prostitution, bullying it’s quite a dark book. Atrocities both large and small. This is an incredibly sad and upsetting book, so be warned. I do however feel there was...

United Kingdom on Sep 14, 2022

Lynne Perednia: Time, our place in time and our place within a social structure are focused on in Ruth Ozeki's Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, A Tale for the Time Being. What gives the novel its philosophical foundation are the beliefs of its author, who is a Buddhist priest.

This foundation also provides an emotional and moral center to the tales of three women, what they believe and the love they feel that is grounded in their beliefs. Throw in quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat and folklore about crows, and the result is a heavyweight novel that is easy to absorb and worthy of contemplation.

Ruth is the present-day narrator who shares with her author creator being a writer and a Buddhist priest living in British Columbia. The fictional Ruth and her husband live in a small village on a sound, where the ocean waves still manage to deliver a package. It at first appears to be a copy of the Proust novel À la recherche du temps perdu saved in plastic.

It is instead a journal remade with the novel's cover, a journal written by a teenage girl in Japan around the turn of the 21st century. Nao was raised in Silicon Valley when her father went to work there, but the bursting of...

United States on Sep 14, 2013

J. Ang: Quite an engaging piece of metafiction, that examines the concept of time through the use of the author as a character in her own story interfacing with the narrative of a Japanese girl Nao. The lines between autobiography and fiction becomes blurred when Ruth (the character) finds Nao's diary cleverly concealed beneath the covers of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", along with some letters and a broken watch encased in a Hello Kitty lunchbox. The contents are protected by a barnacle-encrusted freezer bag that gets washed up on the shores off an remote island in British Columbia, aptly called Desolation Sound. The timing of Ruth's find falls ominously right after the 2011 tsunami.

As Ruth becomes more involved in Nao's diary, the entries also become interwoven with Ruth's narrative as we come to learn more about the circumstances that led to the former Manhattanite's move to Desolation Sound with her partner, Oliver. Nao anticipates a future reader of her diary, and Ruth takes on this persona up to a point where Nao appears to be writing Ruth into being. On the other hand, Ruth feels like she could and should act to prevent certain tragedy from happening to Nao and her...

United Kingdom on Sep 04, 2013

Sensible Cat: What a strange and beautiful book this is. To begin with, it's the highly original tale of the growing relationship between two people who have never met - Naoko, a teenage girl struggling to adapt to her Japanese homeland and its values after a childhood spent in California, and Ruth, the writer who finds her diary washed up by the tide on the remote West Canadian island where she lives. It is also a family story, as Naoko finds hope and healing in a terrible situation by reconnecting with her Zen Buddhist grandmother and her family history, particularly her uncle who perished as a kamikaze pilot aged only 19.

As Ruth finds herself increasingly drawn into Naoko's world, a number of themes are explored. It is a book about clashes between cultures and how they form our world - the difference between conscience and shame, ways to find inner strength and determination, the temptation of suicide and its meaning as an act. There are profound meditations on the Internet, 9/11 and the tsunami, but above all it is a story of the fundamental human values that connect us, and our very different ways of dealing with them. In an age of globalization and migration, one of the most...

United Kingdom on Aug 22, 2013

switterbug/Betsey Van Horn: How do a century-old modern-thinking Buddhist nun, a WW II kamikaze pilot, a bullied 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl on the verge of suicide, her suicidal father, a struggling memoirist on a remote island of British Columbia, Time, Being, Proust, language, philosophy, global warming, and the 2011 Japanese tsunami connect?

In this brilliantly plotted and absorbing, layered novel, one can find the theme in a quote from Proust, quoted by Ozeki:

"In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self."

Remember these poignant and piercing words, as it underpins all that this book is about. You can catch on immediately that it is self-referential, at least to some degree. The memoirist's name is Ruth (like the author)--both Ruths have a husband name Oliver and live on a remote island in British Colombia. And both are writers. The Ruth of the novel suffers from writer's block. She has been trying to write a book of her mother's last years living with Alzheimer's, and to illustrate her own feelings about her experience as daughter and caretaker.

One day, Ruth finds some barnacle-encrusted belongings washed up ashore, possibly from the...

United States on Jul 17, 2013