A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki-shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
"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.
“Do you think Nao is alive?” Ruth asked. “Hard to say. Is death even possible in a universe of many worlds? Is suicide? For every world in which you kill yourself, there’ll be another in which you don’t, in which you go on living. Many worlds seems to guarantee a kind of immortality . . .” She grew impatient then. “I don’t care about other worlds. I care about this one. I care whether she’s dead or alive in this world. And I want to know how her diary and the rest of the stuff washed up here, on this island.”
Do you know that moment? The one moment when you finish a book and you wish you could read it again for the first time?
A Tale for the Time Being is such a book for me. Ironically, I got the book by accident as the online bookseller I placed an order with got mixed up. So, it is fair to say that the book was meant for me, in a similar way that one of the MCs, Ruth, an author (maybe even THE author) based on the coast of British Columbia, finds the diary of a fifteen year old Japanese girl washed up on the coast. From there on, nothing that is or was will be as it once seemed.
I will not describe much of the plot - if you have not read this book, the story will grab you and not let go until the very end (at least). What I can say without spoiling the reading experience, tho, is that I loved, loved, loved all the characters and especially Old Jiko. She's the glue that sticks fragments of sanity to that bubble that is our insane world.
I have said this before but this book has bent my mind, like origami, or time. "The Zen nun Jiko Yasutani once told me in a dream that you can’t understand what it means to be alive on this earth until you understand the time being, and in order to understand the time being, she said, you have to understand what a moment is."
