“You don’t have to feel too sorry for old Marcel”. Seated at a table in a sketchy “French maid café,” Nao assuages her guilt over Proust’s missing words, sounding just like Holden Caulfield. Her purple scrawl fills the pages of a book that formerly contained a volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time - a craftsperson has replaced Proust's text with blank pages, leaving only the original cover. Raised in California and miserable in Tokyo, Nao cheekily addresses her imagined reader: 'Are you sunbathing on a beach in Phuket, or having your toenails buffed in Abu Dhabi?' We’re easily captivated by the 10-year-old English diary - with some Japanese words - written by a Tokyo teen named Naoko (”Nao”) Yasutani. Slipping and sliding in and out of time, her tale takes flight when a woman (coincidentally named Ruth) happens on 'a message in a bottle' as she walks the beach near her British Columbia home.Īttracted by a “tiny sparkle,” Ruth picks up a barnacle-encrusted package, containing a Hello Kitty lunchbox, a diary, a clutch of Japanese letters and a Kamikaze (“sky soldier”) watch. 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.įull 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.Ruth Ozeki folllows her much-admired My Year of Meats with a magical narrative, A Tale for the Time Being, that dances in all worlds at once. 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. A diary is Nao’s only solace-and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. 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.

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. “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.” A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptinessįinalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

A tale for the time being by ruth ozeki