Status
On hold
Genres
Publication
New York : Viking, 2013.
Description
"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.… (more)
Media reviews
In clever and deeply affecting ways, Ruth Ozeki’s luminous new novel explores notions of duality, causation, honour, and time. ... Though [the character] Ruth is clearly intended as a semi-autobiographical portrait of the author, it’s the character of Nao, in all her angsty adolescent
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dismissiveness, that Ozeki truly pulls off (here’s an author who should be writing YA novels). Show Less
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is expansive, provocative and sometimes rather confusing. But that’s okay. It’s supposed to be....It can leave you scratching your head – for starters, the main character of the novel seems to be Ruth Ozeki herself, or at least, a fairly obvious
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facsimile of her – but ultimately, the effect of such riddles is charming, earnest and very much a departure from your typical literary novel....Like them, Ozeki manages to turn existential conundrums into a playful, joyful and pleasantly mind-bending dialogue between reader and writer. Here’s hoping that this book will find its way to an audience just as excited to participate in it. Show Less
"A Tale for the Time Being"... is an exquisite novel: funny, tragic, hard-edged and ethereal at once.
[It's] heady stuff, but it hangs together for a couple of reasons — the exuberance of Ozeki's writing, the engaging nature of her characters and, not least, her scrupulous insistence that it
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doesn't have to hang together, that even as she ties up loose ends, others come unbound. Show Less
Seen from space, or from the vantage point of those conversant with Zen principles, A Tale for the Time Being is probably a deep and illuminating piece of work, with thoughtful things to say about the slipperiness of time. But for those positioned lower in the planet's stratosphere, Ozeki's novel
One version of you might be intrigued. Another might pray it doesn't land on your shore.
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often feels more like the great Pacific gyre it frequently evokes: a vast, churning basin of mental flotsam in which Schrödinger's cat, quantum mechanics, Japanese funeral rituals, crow species, fetish cafes, the anatomy of barnacles, 163 footnotes and six appendices all jostle for attention. It's an impressive amount of stuff.One version of you might be intrigued. Another might pray it doesn't land on your shore.
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If you’re a fan of the metaphysician Martin Heidegger, or the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, you will be pleased at the novel’s tip of the hat to their abstruse notions of time and sub-atomic space. There’s even an appendix to the novel explaining the “thought experiment” known to the
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world as “Schrödinger’s cat...But the novel suffers from a tinge of self satisfaction. It pits sensitive souls like the involuntary kamikaze pilot who loves French literature against brutal army officers, and it’s not a fair fight. The fight becomes Us — readers who derive spiritual sustenance from Marcel Proust, and appreciate “the value of kindness, of education, of independent thinking and liberal ideals” — versus Them, who are sheer brutes. Show Less
This setup for “A Tale for the Time Being,” the new novel by Canadian-American writer Ruth Ozeki (“My Year of Meats”), allows for a fascinating multigenerational tapestry of long ago, recent past, and present. The work is fiction, but intriguingly self-referential....Nao calls herself a
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“time being,” anyone who “lives in time.” Her diary, which is charmingly offbeat, clever, funny, and heartbreaking, reveals the isolation, displacement, and loneliness of a girl trying to fit in at school in Tokyo after her father loses his Silicon Valley tech job and grapples with his own depression and suicidal tendencies (which Nao refers to as his second hobby). On top of the fraught cultural transition and troubled home life, Nao also has identity issues that stray beyond normal teen drama. Certain diary entries strain credulity, such as Nao’s descriptions of the complicity of teachers and an elaborately staged mock funeral. But most of the writing resonates with an immediacy and rawness that is believable and touching. Show Less
Whenever the word “time” comes up — “wasting time,” “about time,” “in time” — the reader must stop and think about the many angles of approach to that subject in Ruth Ozeki’s delightful yet sometimes harrowing new novel, “A Tale for the Time Being.” ...Many of the elements
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of Nao’s story — schoolgirl bullying, unemployed suicidal “salarymen,” kamikaze pilots — are among a Western reader’s most familiar images of Japan, but in Nao’s telling, refracted through Ruth’s musings, they become fresh and immediate, occasionally searingly painful. Ozeki takes on big themes in “A Tale for the Time Being” — not just the death of individuals but also the death of the planet Show Less
Ozeki uses the relationship between author and schoolgirl to conflate past with present and fact with fiction, and A Tale for the Time Being – with translation footnotes, six appendices, a bibliography and quotations from Japanese Zen masters – is a metafiction wrestling with grand themes. Ruth
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and her husband contemplate quantum mechanics and Schrödinger’s cat. Nao and her father struggle with the modern notion that, thanks to an internet which catalogues mistakes, our past is ever present.But the book is at its strongest not in these ambitious philosophical explorations, which can at times feel unsubtle, but in its quiet detailing of the love and pain of family life – in the moving depiction of the small hurts and comforts of Ruth’s marriage and in the painful portrait of the tortured relationship between Nao and her depressive father. ......she provides us with a compelling coming-of-age story.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member EBT1002
This is a novel about time and being, steeped in the Buddhist exhortation to Be. Here. Now. It is an exploration of both the passion for life and the allure of suicide. Death is inevitable, muses at least one character, so why not take control of its timing and circumstances? Why not go into that
Ruth and her husband Oliver live on a remote island in Desolation Sound on the western edge of British Columbia. A Hello Kitty lunchbox and a journal wash up on their shores; the journal appears to have been written by a 16-year-old girl living in Japan (but having grown up in California, giving her voice an American teenage edge) in the months prior to the earthquake and tsunami. Nao is a typical teenager, frustrated by adult authority and contemptuous of parental angst, expressing her rage through self-destructive impulses. She is also a wise and resilient soul. When her suicidal father takes her to spend a summer in a remote (yes, parallel) Buddhist monastery with her 104-year-old great grandmother, a Buddhist monk, Nao (pronounced Now) learns what it feels like to be valued, to be held, to be respected -- and to be held accountable. She learns meditation and she learns the satisfaction of basic, honest work. This sounds trite and, perhaps, incredible. But in Ozeki's capable narrative, it rings true. She starts as a bullied teenager who believes that finding meaning in life is bullshit and that staying busy is what makes life tolerable, that "...it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life." She grows into a young woman who wants to write the story of her great grandmother before she forgets, who understands the press of time because "I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die." This may sound fatalistic, but it's also simply the truth.
The bond that develops between Ruth and Nao through Ruth's reading of the journal and her research into the family's history is palpable and satisfying. The unfolding of Nao's relationship with Jiko, her old great grandmother, is exquisite. The interweaving of western and eastern thought, philosophy, and history exposes differences, certainly, but the shared humanity trumps all.
Nao's 16-year-old voice clangs occasionally, which is absolutely my only beef with [[Ruth Ozeki]]'s touching, honest, and fulfilling novel. This is already one of my favorite reads of the year.
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dark night with intention, consciousness, and courage? But this novel is also a tale of the yearning for human connection and the power of this connection to heal, to give meaning, and to transform history as it is remembered. Ruth and her husband Oliver live on a remote island in Desolation Sound on the western edge of British Columbia. A Hello Kitty lunchbox and a journal wash up on their shores; the journal appears to have been written by a 16-year-old girl living in Japan (but having grown up in California, giving her voice an American teenage edge) in the months prior to the earthquake and tsunami. Nao is a typical teenager, frustrated by adult authority and contemptuous of parental angst, expressing her rage through self-destructive impulses. She is also a wise and resilient soul. When her suicidal father takes her to spend a summer in a remote (yes, parallel) Buddhist monastery with her 104-year-old great grandmother, a Buddhist monk, Nao (pronounced Now) learns what it feels like to be valued, to be held, to be respected -- and to be held accountable. She learns meditation and she learns the satisfaction of basic, honest work. This sounds trite and, perhaps, incredible. But in Ozeki's capable narrative, it rings true. She starts as a bullied teenager who believes that finding meaning in life is bullshit and that staying busy is what makes life tolerable, that "...it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life." She grows into a young woman who wants to write the story of her great grandmother before she forgets, who understands the press of time because "I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die." This may sound fatalistic, but it's also simply the truth.
The bond that develops between Ruth and Nao through Ruth's reading of the journal and her research into the family's history is palpable and satisfying. The unfolding of Nao's relationship with Jiko, her old great grandmother, is exquisite. The interweaving of western and eastern thought, philosophy, and history exposes differences, certainly, but the shared humanity trumps all.
Nao's 16-year-old voice clangs occasionally, which is absolutely my only beef with [[Ruth Ozeki]]'s touching, honest, and fulfilling novel. This is already one of my favorite reads of the year.
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LibraryThing member brenzi
”Ruth stared glumly at the cat. ‘I’m not following,’ she said. ‘I should be wearing the Code of Shame. I’m not smart enough to understand.” (Page 398)
This is a review of two books although Ruth Ozeki laughingly (in my mind) intends you to view it as a single novel. The first book can
The diary is found by Ruth, a writer who lives on the island (when she isn’t living in NYC) with her husband Oliver. (Hmmm, is this an autobiographical novel? Ozeki’s husband is named Oliver and they split their time in NY and BC in the same way. Well, not important so…) They assume the diary, which was contained in an Hello, Kitty lunchbox, was part of the detritus from the 2011 earthquake/tsunami that has started showing up on the Pacific coast of North America. Chapters alternate between Nao’s diary, which Ruth is reading and Ruth’s analysis, with Oliver’s help, of what she’s read. I found the chapters that told about Ruth to be somewhat more engaging. Nao’s family was living in California when the tech bubble burst and her father lost his job. The family returned to Tokyo where he can’t find a job because of Japan’s economic downturn, and where Nao is bullied horribly by her classmates. They are both, unbeknownst to each other, planning to commit suicide.Finally, Nao’s great grandmother Jiko, a 104 year old bald Buddhist priest appears to take her to her cliffside temple for the summer and Nao vows to write her autobiography. The temple is located in Sendai, the area hardest hit by the tsunami and when Ruth reads this she puts two and two together but as she reads further she realizes sometimes two and two doesn’t equal four.
Ozeki finds plenty to preach about and she wastes no time sermonizing on bullying, the environment and Zen Buddhism’s tenets but some of it got tiring as it made up a large portion of the narrative. And when the teacher started taking part in the bullying I threw my hands up in disbelief.
But as I said there are two books here and the last hundred pages proved to be riveting, for the most part and left me mostly glad that I had forged ahead and read the whole book as Ruth seeks to solve the mystery of whether Nao survived the tsunami or not and whether it would be possible to actually find her. Interestingly, professional reviewers seem to pretty much love the book but LT reviews are fairly harsh. I would recommend it with a caution that it’s a big investment of time, which happens to be what the book is about.
This is a review of two books although Ruth Ozeki laughingly (in my mind) intends you to view it as a single novel. The first book can
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be found on the first 300 pages and, honestly, I wanted to ditch it too many times to count. In it we are introduced to one of the most irritating voices (from my POV) in literature, sixteen year old Nao (Now) Yasutani. She simply did not engage me in any way. I know she is meant to be a typical teenager but she was over the top and unappealing. We meet her via her diary which has washed up on the shores of an island around British Columbia, and which she has addressed to you, the reader, wherever or whenever you may be reading it. It’s all based on the Zen idea of ”time being,” and Ozeki also throws in quantum mechanics and Schrodinger’s cat even makes an appearance. Like Ruth, I don’t think I’m smart enough for this book or the five appendixes at the back.The diary is found by Ruth, a writer who lives on the island (when she isn’t living in NYC) with her husband Oliver. (Hmmm, is this an autobiographical novel? Ozeki’s husband is named Oliver and they split their time in NY and BC in the same way. Well, not important so…) They assume the diary, which was contained in an Hello, Kitty lunchbox, was part of the detritus from the 2011 earthquake/tsunami that has started showing up on the Pacific coast of North America. Chapters alternate between Nao’s diary, which Ruth is reading and Ruth’s analysis, with Oliver’s help, of what she’s read. I found the chapters that told about Ruth to be somewhat more engaging. Nao’s family was living in California when the tech bubble burst and her father lost his job. The family returned to Tokyo where he can’t find a job because of Japan’s economic downturn, and where Nao is bullied horribly by her classmates. They are both, unbeknownst to each other, planning to commit suicide.Finally, Nao’s great grandmother Jiko, a 104 year old bald Buddhist priest appears to take her to her cliffside temple for the summer and Nao vows to write her autobiography. The temple is located in Sendai, the area hardest hit by the tsunami and when Ruth reads this she puts two and two together but as she reads further she realizes sometimes two and two doesn’t equal four.
Ozeki finds plenty to preach about and she wastes no time sermonizing on bullying, the environment and Zen Buddhism’s tenets but some of it got tiring as it made up a large portion of the narrative. And when the teacher started taking part in the bullying I threw my hands up in disbelief.
But as I said there are two books here and the last hundred pages proved to be riveting, for the most part and left me mostly glad that I had forged ahead and read the whole book as Ruth seeks to solve the mystery of whether Nao survived the tsunami or not and whether it would be possible to actually find her. Interestingly, professional reviewers seem to pretty much love the book but LT reviews are fairly harsh. I would recommend it with a caution that it’s a big investment of time, which happens to be what the book is about.
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LibraryThing member JolleyG
Having read other books by Ruth Ozeki, I was not daunted by the very strange first chapter. This chapter purports to be the diary of a teenager named Nao who lives in Japan and who is writing her diary in a Tokyo coffee shop. First she fantasizes about who might be reading her diary at some point
The next chapter is written in third person, and now we are hearing about Ruth (the author of this book) and her beach find in Vancouver, which is a Hello Kitty lunch box containing a watch, some letters and a diary. And this is none other than the diary we got a glimpse of in the first chapter. Ruth’s husband assumes that this beach find is the beginning of a wave of flotsam that will arrive on the North American coast after being tossed out to sea during the Tohoku tsunami.
The book continues with these two alternating stories, which sets up a rhythmic motion like waves on a shore, going back and forth between Ruth’s life with her husband in Vancouver and Nao’s story, which is now annotated by Ruth in order to translate Japanese references and phrases, as well as to insert her own thoughts.
Nao’s diary is written in a modified book, which was originally Marcel Proust’s “La Recherche du Temps Perdu.” Ruth’s part of the story is the author’s own story about her writer’s block, about recovering the past in order to write a book about dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, which, of course, is a disease that causes one to forget the past slowly but surely. So we have a book about lost time: lost time recovered and time lost forever. In one chapter we are reminded that Nao is pronounced like “now,” the point where the past is being brought forward in remembrance.
Nao’s family has suffered a disruption. They had been living in California where Nao’s father was a gifted computer programmer, and Nao was well liked at School. After Nao’s father was laid off from his job, the family returns to Tokyo where Nao’s father has become a recluse who thinks only of suicide, and Nao is bullied at school. During a summer vacation at her grandmother’s temple near the Sendai region of Japan, Nao learns about her uncle Haruki who was a pilot in World War II.
As Ruth reads Nao’s story she becomes concerned for the welfare of her and her family and tries to do some research online so that she might somehow save Nao and her father. However, Ruth is so totally in the present of Nao’s story that she doesn’t realize, until her husband points it out to her, that Nao by this time would be in her 20s.
Time is always the strong thread running through the narrative, and time continues to play tricks. Ruth and her husband get into a discussion about quantum physics and how there may be various Ruths and various Naos living simultaneous lives in parallel worlds. Unless the reader is fascinated by quantum theories, this could distract a bit from an otherwise intriguing story.
What was strangely “quantum” for me was that, as much as I love Ruth Ozeki’s writing, I was dealing with my own time issue, and a long pause ensued between my starting the book and finishing it. For a time I “lost” the book and had to find it again. When I finally got it back, I was putting it down and letting other books get in the way. So it was interesting when I read the part in the book where Ruth herself was reading Nao’s diary at a snail’s pace and getting distracted by other things. At one point she “lost” the final pages of the diary, but then they reappeared.
This book is totally different from Ruth Ozeki’s other books, and I think it is a work of genius.
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in time and what they might be doing while reading it. Then she jumps to another topic and begins to imagine a kinky sex scene. Finally she admits that her real intent is to write a serious work about her “anarchist-feminist-novelist turned Buddhist nun” grandmother and that anyone interested in perversion might as well put the book down. The next chapter is written in third person, and now we are hearing about Ruth (the author of this book) and her beach find in Vancouver, which is a Hello Kitty lunch box containing a watch, some letters and a diary. And this is none other than the diary we got a glimpse of in the first chapter. Ruth’s husband assumes that this beach find is the beginning of a wave of flotsam that will arrive on the North American coast after being tossed out to sea during the Tohoku tsunami.
The book continues with these two alternating stories, which sets up a rhythmic motion like waves on a shore, going back and forth between Ruth’s life with her husband in Vancouver and Nao’s story, which is now annotated by Ruth in order to translate Japanese references and phrases, as well as to insert her own thoughts.
Nao’s diary is written in a modified book, which was originally Marcel Proust’s “La Recherche du Temps Perdu.” Ruth’s part of the story is the author’s own story about her writer’s block, about recovering the past in order to write a book about dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, which, of course, is a disease that causes one to forget the past slowly but surely. So we have a book about lost time: lost time recovered and time lost forever. In one chapter we are reminded that Nao is pronounced like “now,” the point where the past is being brought forward in remembrance.
Nao’s family has suffered a disruption. They had been living in California where Nao’s father was a gifted computer programmer, and Nao was well liked at School. After Nao’s father was laid off from his job, the family returns to Tokyo where Nao’s father has become a recluse who thinks only of suicide, and Nao is bullied at school. During a summer vacation at her grandmother’s temple near the Sendai region of Japan, Nao learns about her uncle Haruki who was a pilot in World War II.
As Ruth reads Nao’s story she becomes concerned for the welfare of her and her family and tries to do some research online so that she might somehow save Nao and her father. However, Ruth is so totally in the present of Nao’s story that she doesn’t realize, until her husband points it out to her, that Nao by this time would be in her 20s.
Time is always the strong thread running through the narrative, and time continues to play tricks. Ruth and her husband get into a discussion about quantum physics and how there may be various Ruths and various Naos living simultaneous lives in parallel worlds. Unless the reader is fascinated by quantum theories, this could distract a bit from an otherwise intriguing story.
What was strangely “quantum” for me was that, as much as I love Ruth Ozeki’s writing, I was dealing with my own time issue, and a long pause ensued between my starting the book and finishing it. For a time I “lost” the book and had to find it again. When I finally got it back, I was putting it down and letting other books get in the way. So it was interesting when I read the part in the book where Ruth herself was reading Nao’s diary at a snail’s pace and getting distracted by other things. At one point she “lost” the final pages of the diary, but then they reappeared.
This book is totally different from Ruth Ozeki’s other books, and I think it is a work of genius.
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LibraryThing member Cariola
I really, really hated this book--almost as much as I hated The Elegance of the Hedgehog, another pretentious novel impressed with its own philosophy. The author tries way too hard to be profound--and, worse still, her supposed profundity is put into the voice of an irritatingly precocious,
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self-absorbed teenager. As in the aforementioned despised book, the young person learns the wisdom of life from a wise elder (at least in this case not a cranky one). Who are we? What is time/ Do we have an essence beyond our bodies? Are we connected to all other persons and things? Who cares? Show Less
LibraryThing member Laura400
Ozeki seems like a very nice person. And I liked much of the half of the book set in Japan, especially the stories of the reluctant kamikaze pilot and his extraordinary mother. I just think the book is frustrating, because for me it doesn't really succeed as it could have.
It was too much of a
I also found the tone a little grating: the author was never condescending but she obviously intended this entire book to instruct. Either the eponymous author or her husband would just explain concepts to us, in a friendly lecture, or the Japanese teenager would do so to her reader. And while I liked the frame of having a package washing up on an island in British Columbia, the Canadian half of the story felt stilted and less interesting.
But it's well-written, and it's certainly sincerely meant. I am sure many will enjoy it. I only regret that, to me, the excellent Japanese material deserved better. I am sure that she will get there in future books.
It was too much of a
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jumble for me, moving from the wrenching travails of a teenage misfit in Japan, through some basics of zen practices, to a taste of quantum mechanics and even to deus ex machina involving dreams and a crow.I also found the tone a little grating: the author was never condescending but she obviously intended this entire book to instruct. Either the eponymous author or her husband would just explain concepts to us, in a friendly lecture, or the Japanese teenager would do so to her reader. And while I liked the frame of having a package washing up on an island in British Columbia, the Canadian half of the story felt stilted and less interesting.
But it's well-written, and it's certainly sincerely meant. I am sure many will enjoy it. I only regret that, to me, the excellent Japanese material deserved better. I am sure that she will get there in future books.
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LibraryThing member Dorritt
On the surface, this is the tale of a modern-day author (Ruth) who discovers, washed up on the shore of her remote Canadian island homestead, a journal written some 10-20 years earlier by a suicidal Japanese teenager (Nao), with which she then spends the rest of the novel reading and interacting.
Which is not to imply that I didn’t enjoy the novel. On the contrary, I found much of this tale engrossing and beguiling. I dare you not to ache for poor Nao, whose tale of trying to navigate a Japanese adolescence ruled by ruthless competition, savage bullying and weird fetishes is so awful, it makes you feel like American schools and culture may be doing something right after all. Or for her poor father, plunged into a life of poverty, shame, and degradation by a capitalist society with no room for ethics and a culture with no tolerance for non-conformity. Or her father’s uncle, an earnest university student dragged away from his studies during the final days of WW2 to be sacrificed as a Kamakazi pilot on the alter of patriotic pride by his country’s sadistic rulers.
In contrast, Ruth’s story is a lot less dramatic –she’s recently lost her mother, she misses living in NYC, she’s got an epic case of writer’s block, she lives on a lush but isolated island with a bunch of “characters,” one of whom is her husband, an auto-didact, neauveau-hippie preoccupied with environmental issue. Because of this, the novel for me felt a little lop-sided – the chapters dedicated to Ruth’s life coming off as rather pale and self-indulgent in comparison to the emotionally rich chapters dedicated to Nao’s narrative.
As I’ve said, however, my problem with this story isn’t that it lacks either heart or good storytelling. Rather, it’s the author’s approach to magical realism that throws me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading Marquez, Chabon and other artists of the craft, it’s that magical realism works best when you don’t try to explain it. Ozeki, on the other hand, buries us with possible explanations, everything from Zen philosophy to quantum physics, Proustian metaphysics and ancestor worship. I think the juxtaposition is meant to highlight common themes, but I’m not sure that the explication required to drag these elements into the story (especially the final chapters) doesn’t detract rather than add to the novel’s overarching theme, which seem to be that time may be fluid, but love, sacrifice and loss are eternal.
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What’s less clear is the extent to which we’re meant to believe that the process of reading the journal somehow draws Ruth & Nao’s parallel universes close enough that they momentarily intersect, enabling the two women to inadvertently alter each other’s fates. Which is not to imply that I didn’t enjoy the novel. On the contrary, I found much of this tale engrossing and beguiling. I dare you not to ache for poor Nao, whose tale of trying to navigate a Japanese adolescence ruled by ruthless competition, savage bullying and weird fetishes is so awful, it makes you feel like American schools and culture may be doing something right after all. Or for her poor father, plunged into a life of poverty, shame, and degradation by a capitalist society with no room for ethics and a culture with no tolerance for non-conformity. Or her father’s uncle, an earnest university student dragged away from his studies during the final days of WW2 to be sacrificed as a Kamakazi pilot on the alter of patriotic pride by his country’s sadistic rulers.
In contrast, Ruth’s story is a lot less dramatic –she’s recently lost her mother, she misses living in NYC, she’s got an epic case of writer’s block, she lives on a lush but isolated island with a bunch of “characters,” one of whom is her husband, an auto-didact, neauveau-hippie preoccupied with environmental issue. Because of this, the novel for me felt a little lop-sided – the chapters dedicated to Ruth’s life coming off as rather pale and self-indulgent in comparison to the emotionally rich chapters dedicated to Nao’s narrative.
As I’ve said, however, my problem with this story isn’t that it lacks either heart or good storytelling. Rather, it’s the author’s approach to magical realism that throws me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading Marquez, Chabon and other artists of the craft, it’s that magical realism works best when you don’t try to explain it. Ozeki, on the other hand, buries us with possible explanations, everything from Zen philosophy to quantum physics, Proustian metaphysics and ancestor worship. I think the juxtaposition is meant to highlight common themes, but I’m not sure that the explication required to drag these elements into the story (especially the final chapters) doesn’t detract rather than add to the novel’s overarching theme, which seem to be that time may be fluid, but love, sacrifice and loss are eternal.
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LibraryThing member Beamis12
Another book that one needs to pay great attention too because it is so easy to get lost. I was drawn in by the characters, especially that of a young girl being bullied unmercifully in school. It was heartbreaking, the depths that these fellow Japanese classmate went too and the fact that a
From Quantum mechanics to the flotsam and jetsam that make up the tidal pool from the Japanese Tsunami, now washing upon United States shorelines on the west coast. The difference in the makeup of a human being and the hope that in time we will learn to celebrate that difference instead of making this an object of fun. Brutal and harshness set against peace and compassion. There is so much in this novel, it was rather brilliant and I am very glad that this is one I chose to read.
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teacher actually encouraged them, instead of helping her. Sounded like the nightly news here in the states. There is so much to this novel , from the tsunami in Japan to the life and theories of a Buddhist nun.From Quantum mechanics to the flotsam and jetsam that make up the tidal pool from the Japanese Tsunami, now washing upon United States shorelines on the west coast. The difference in the makeup of a human being and the hope that in time we will learn to celebrate that difference instead of making this an object of fun. Brutal and harshness set against peace and compassion. There is so much in this novel, it was rather brilliant and I am very glad that this is one I chose to read.
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LibraryThing member chasidar
I really enjoyed this book! I listened to the audiobook which was read by the author, Ruth Ozeki, and she did an excellent job giving life to her characters. The story is told alternately by Nao, a teenage girl living in Japan with her parents, and Ruth, an author living on an island in Canada who
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finds Nao's diary on the beach. The story was engaging though I found I cared much more about Nao than about Ruth. A Tale for the Time Being is one of those books that you are sad when it ends. I would have liked to continue spending time with these characters, and finding out where there lives went next. Show Less
LibraryThing member SandDune
'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.'
With that definition on the first page and the fact that A Tale for the Time Being ends with six appendices (on subjects as diverse as quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat,
Ruth, an American writer of Japanese descent, is walking along the beach near her home on a remote island in British Columbia, when she discovers a well-wrapped package containing the diary of Nao(ko) Yasutani, a Japanese teenager living in Tokyo, as well as other letters. As Ruth reads the diary she becomes more and more concerned about Nao's fate, not only because she assumes that the diary has been swept into the sea by the 2011 tsunami, but also because the diary reveals that Nao plans to commit suicide. Brought up in Silicon Valley, she is facing severe bullying in her new school in Tokyo, where her parents have returned to live after her father lost his job. And so the story continues, alternating between Ruth's life with her husband, a life which to someone from New York City seems sometimes to belong to someone else, and Nao's story in Tokyo. And as Nao tells her own story she also tells the story of her great-grandmother, still alive and well at the age of 104, who was an early feminist and writer in pre-war Japan, and then became a nun after the death of her son in a kamikaze mission in World War II.
When the two strands of the narrative remained separate I had my hopes for this book, but as they begin to come together in the second half I was left with a growing feeling of disatisfaction. The book did not gel into the harmonious whole that I had hoped: rather as the mixture of ideas within the book seemed to be more and more disconnected from each other. So in the end a book with some excellent ideas, but whose execution, for me at any rate, does not wrap them into a coherent whole.
With that definition on the first page and the fact that A Tale for the Time Being ends with six appendices (on subjects as diverse as quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat,
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Japanese temple names, and Zen Buddhism) as well as a bibliography and a glossary of Japanese phrases, it's clear from the start that this is a book which takes itself seriously, one where the reader is expected to do some work. And this worked for me at the start of the book, but as I read more and more I got the feeling that perhaps the author was trying a little too hard?Ruth, an American writer of Japanese descent, is walking along the beach near her home on a remote island in British Columbia, when she discovers a well-wrapped package containing the diary of Nao(ko) Yasutani, a Japanese teenager living in Tokyo, as well as other letters. As Ruth reads the diary she becomes more and more concerned about Nao's fate, not only because she assumes that the diary has been swept into the sea by the 2011 tsunami, but also because the diary reveals that Nao plans to commit suicide. Brought up in Silicon Valley, she is facing severe bullying in her new school in Tokyo, where her parents have returned to live after her father lost his job. And so the story continues, alternating between Ruth's life with her husband, a life which to someone from New York City seems sometimes to belong to someone else, and Nao's story in Tokyo. And as Nao tells her own story she also tells the story of her great-grandmother, still alive and well at the age of 104, who was an early feminist and writer in pre-war Japan, and then became a nun after the death of her son in a kamikaze mission in World War II.
When the two strands of the narrative remained separate I had my hopes for this book, but as they begin to come together in the second half I was left with a growing feeling of disatisfaction. The book did not gel into the harmonious whole that I had hoped: rather as the mixture of ideas within the book seemed to be more and more disconnected from each other. So in the end a book with some excellent ideas, but whose execution, for me at any rate, does not wrap them into a coherent whole.
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LibraryThing member eilonwy_anne
I loved this book, and I've been reluctant to review it. Why? Maybe it's like that anxiety Umberto Eco says 'attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.' To me, this book was about as big as the world, and saying something true about it is daunting, and quickly descends into
I was dubious about this book, and it caught me on the first page. It's inviting, and thoughtful, and charming. It's so much about voice -- two voices -- that it doesn't really matter what the plot is: it's about so much more than that. I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, and the book had its own voice, too. One I wanted to keep listening to, and mourned when it was over. I'm going to read it again, on paper, because it's my friend, and I don't want it to stop speaking.
So, here goes my hand-waving: this book is about death, and loss, and time. It's about alienation -- like all capital-l Literature! -- but also about connection. It's about Zen Buddhism, and crows, and language. It's my favorite novel I read in 2017, and I read some great books. If you're not sure you're up for all that, give it a try. It might just catch you, on the very first page.
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hand-waving and sentimental twaddle.I was dubious about this book, and it caught me on the first page. It's inviting, and thoughtful, and charming. It's so much about voice -- two voices -- that it doesn't really matter what the plot is: it's about so much more than that. I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, and the book had its own voice, too. One I wanted to keep listening to, and mourned when it was over. I'm going to read it again, on paper, because it's my friend, and I don't want it to stop speaking.
So, here goes my hand-waving: this book is about death, and loss, and time. It's about alienation -- like all capital-l Literature! -- but also about connection. It's about Zen Buddhism, and crows, and language. It's my favorite novel I read in 2017, and I read some great books. If you're not sure you're up for all that, give it a try. It might just catch you, on the very first page.
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LibraryThing member arubabookwoman
The diary of 16 year old Nao, a Japanese girl raised in California, but living unhappily in Tokyo, washes up on the shore of a Pacific Northwest island, where it is found by Ruth, a blocked writer. As Ruth (slowly) reads Nao's diary, she learns of Nao's suicidal thoughts. Nao is horrifically
I was much more interested in Nao's story than in Ruth's, and became impatient when reading through Ruth's part of the story. The novel totally lost me however, when it veered into the supernatural and metaphysical, as Ruth's dreams began directing the course the events depicted in Nao's diary took.
2 stars
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bullied at school, and her only solace is her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun. Ruth becomes obsessed with finding out what has happened to Nao--whether she is real, and whether she is still alive (the diary is probably several years old).I was much more interested in Nao's story than in Ruth's, and became impatient when reading through Ruth's part of the story. The novel totally lost me however, when it veered into the supernatural and metaphysical, as Ruth's dreams began directing the course the events depicted in Nao's diary took.
2 stars
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LibraryThing member A_Reader_of_Fictions
Generally, when I sit down to write my review of a book, I know precisely what I want to say and have a pretty good idea how I feel about the book in question. My reactions tend to be clear and summing up my thoughts is not that difficult. Not so with A Tale for the Time Being. There were parts
In subject matter, though not in characterization or overall aim, A Tale for the Time Being reminds me heavily of Jonathan Safran Foer's remarkable book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Both follow story lines in the past and the present, as a main character searches through the history of their ancestors to find meaning in life after tragedy. Both draw lines between WWII and 9-11. Both feature odd protagonists, though they are strange in entirely different ways. Ozeki does very different things with these elements, but the similarities are fascinating, and I would recommend A Tale for the Time Being to Foer fans.
The opening pages of Ozeki's tale captured me immediately. A Tale for the Time Being opens with Nao, a sixteen-year-old girl living in Tokyo. Though born in Japan, she feels American, having spent much of her childhood overseas in Sunnyvale, California, where her father was working. When he lost his job in the bursting of the Dot-com bubble, they moved back to Japan. Nao hates it there. Her father still hasn't found work, instead descending first into gambling and then becoming an agoraphobic determined to commit suicide. Nao suffers from the change to the Japanese school system as well, since she's behind academically and horribly bullied by her classmates. At the time she begins her story, she's a drop-out, a ronin, studying to take the exams to get into high school again.
What I loved about the opening, though, is how authentic and real Nao feels. She's been through so much darkness at that point, is herself intent on suicide, but there's something fresh, young, and vibrant about her narration. My favorite parts of Nao's story are always those where she loses her train of thought and goes off on a rambling tangent. Her story itself is very sad, but her tangents are where you really get a look at the real Nao and how her mind works. She's darkly funny and I was desperately hoping for her story to come to a happy ending.
Nao's story takes place within another story, Ruth's. Ruth is half-Japanese and living in a remote Canadian city with her husband, Oliver. An urbanite, Ruth does not love her life there. She hates the way the power is constantly out from the storms and she's been struggling to get any writing done, cut off from her inspiration. Out on the beach, she finds a plastic bag and plans to throw it away, afraid of what might be inside. Oliver opens the bag, and inside finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox, within which are letters in old-fashioned Japanese, a diary in French, and a copy of Proust with a school girl's writing inside, mostly in English.
Ruth's story is both a mystery, as she searches for the ending to Nao's story, and self-discovery. As she reads, Ruth also researches, trying to find evidence that this diary is in fact a true thing. She gets the diaries and letters translated and the story slowly unfolds around her, becoming more present to her than her actual life. There's an almost magical realism sort of feel to Ruth's portion of the narrative, as though there's an actual mystical connection between writer and reader, allowing Ruth to influence the story despite the distance and time between them, though everything else is couched firmly in the real, non-magical world.
Within Nao's story, there are others, as she learns about her grandmother, her uncle and her father. Ozeki's got a huge focus on family and on the importance of life. She also delves into powerful philosophical themes, like the purpose of existence and Schrödinger's cat. The title, for example, is a lovely play on words, making use of two meanings, both a tale for the moment and a tale for beings that live in time. That phrase pops up at many points in the narrative and is crucial to Ozeki's overarching themes.
Unfortunately, I don't really feel like I got this. I think I'm partway there, but I most certainly do not have everything all figured out, which I don't think you're supposed to necessarily, but I should be a bit further along. Part of my problem is that I didn't have any clue where the story was going, having falsely believed Nao's assertion that it would be a story about her grandmother, but Nao is not a reliable storyteller, which had already been established, so silly me. As such, I allowed myself to get bored in sections that didn't seem important to me, because I had a predefined idea of where I thought the story was going. My expectations kept me from paying as much attention as I should have and from picking up all of the threads needed to weave the story into a cohesive, meaningful whole in my head. I put the fact that I didn't enjoy this more solely on my own head.
All I can leave you with is that, though this novel didn't get an absurdly high rating from me in the end, it's one I will be keeping in my personal collection. These days, I have so many books I tend to give them away once I finish, except the ones in the 4-5 range, and a lot of the 4s I pass on as well. I think A Tale for the Time Being is one of those odd books that I will have a much greater appreciation for on a reread, because I'll have a better idea of what to expect and be able to appreciate more the intricate weaving of Ozeki's story.
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that I loved utterly, parts that bored me, and parts I'm not sure that I quite fathom. As such, this review might be a bit meandering, so bear with me.In subject matter, though not in characterization or overall aim, A Tale for the Time Being reminds me heavily of Jonathan Safran Foer's remarkable book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Both follow story lines in the past and the present, as a main character searches through the history of their ancestors to find meaning in life after tragedy. Both draw lines between WWII and 9-11. Both feature odd protagonists, though they are strange in entirely different ways. Ozeki does very different things with these elements, but the similarities are fascinating, and I would recommend A Tale for the Time Being to Foer fans.
The opening pages of Ozeki's tale captured me immediately. A Tale for the Time Being opens with Nao, a sixteen-year-old girl living in Tokyo. Though born in Japan, she feels American, having spent much of her childhood overseas in Sunnyvale, California, where her father was working. When he lost his job in the bursting of the Dot-com bubble, they moved back to Japan. Nao hates it there. Her father still hasn't found work, instead descending first into gambling and then becoming an agoraphobic determined to commit suicide. Nao suffers from the change to the Japanese school system as well, since she's behind academically and horribly bullied by her classmates. At the time she begins her story, she's a drop-out, a ronin, studying to take the exams to get into high school again.
What I loved about the opening, though, is how authentic and real Nao feels. She's been through so much darkness at that point, is herself intent on suicide, but there's something fresh, young, and vibrant about her narration. My favorite parts of Nao's story are always those where she loses her train of thought and goes off on a rambling tangent. Her story itself is very sad, but her tangents are where you really get a look at the real Nao and how her mind works. She's darkly funny and I was desperately hoping for her story to come to a happy ending.
Nao's story takes place within another story, Ruth's. Ruth is half-Japanese and living in a remote Canadian city with her husband, Oliver. An urbanite, Ruth does not love her life there. She hates the way the power is constantly out from the storms and she's been struggling to get any writing done, cut off from her inspiration. Out on the beach, she finds a plastic bag and plans to throw it away, afraid of what might be inside. Oliver opens the bag, and inside finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox, within which are letters in old-fashioned Japanese, a diary in French, and a copy of Proust with a school girl's writing inside, mostly in English.
Ruth's story is both a mystery, as she searches for the ending to Nao's story, and self-discovery. As she reads, Ruth also researches, trying to find evidence that this diary is in fact a true thing. She gets the diaries and letters translated and the story slowly unfolds around her, becoming more present to her than her actual life. There's an almost magical realism sort of feel to Ruth's portion of the narrative, as though there's an actual mystical connection between writer and reader, allowing Ruth to influence the story despite the distance and time between them, though everything else is couched firmly in the real, non-magical world.
Within Nao's story, there are others, as she learns about her grandmother, her uncle and her father. Ozeki's got a huge focus on family and on the importance of life. She also delves into powerful philosophical themes, like the purpose of existence and Schrödinger's cat. The title, for example, is a lovely play on words, making use of two meanings, both a tale for the moment and a tale for beings that live in time. That phrase pops up at many points in the narrative and is crucial to Ozeki's overarching themes.
Unfortunately, I don't really feel like I got this. I think I'm partway there, but I most certainly do not have everything all figured out, which I don't think you're supposed to necessarily, but I should be a bit further along. Part of my problem is that I didn't have any clue where the story was going, having falsely believed Nao's assertion that it would be a story about her grandmother, but Nao is not a reliable storyteller, which had already been established, so silly me. As such, I allowed myself to get bored in sections that didn't seem important to me, because I had a predefined idea of where I thought the story was going. My expectations kept me from paying as much attention as I should have and from picking up all of the threads needed to weave the story into a cohesive, meaningful whole in my head. I put the fact that I didn't enjoy this more solely on my own head.
All I can leave you with is that, though this novel didn't get an absurdly high rating from me in the end, it's one I will be keeping in my personal collection. These days, I have so many books I tend to give them away once I finish, except the ones in the 4-5 range, and a lot of the 4s I pass on as well. I think A Tale for the Time Being is one of those odd books that I will have a much greater appreciation for on a reread, because I'll have a better idea of what to expect and be able to appreciate more the intricate weaving of Ozeki's story.
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LibraryThing member Schatje
Wow! Whee! Whew! Finding the words to clearly express my feelings about this book are difficult: “Sometimes the mind arrives but the words don’t.” It is an enthralling, mesmerizing read which leaves the reader with much to ponder.
The plot seems simple. Nao Yasutani is a 16-year-old living in
About a decade later, after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan, on a remote island on British Columbia’s coast, Ruth discovers Nao’s diary, along with some other artifacts, inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Ruth, the novelist, becomes Nao’s reader. Ruth also becomes a detective of sorts as she tries to find out how the lunchbox found its way to her and what happened to Nao and her family.
That the book is a meditation on time is obvious from the beginning. The book’s title and the opening definition of a “time being” as “someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be” are the first clues. That Nao’s diary has the cover of Marcel Proust’s "À la recherche du temps perdu" is no coincidence. Included are quotes from an ancient Buddhist master: “Time itself is being . . . and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.”
As suggested by the above quotation, the interconnectedness of life is another major theme. For example, the book explores the connections between writer and reader. Nao claims that she and her reader together will “make magic” and Ruth eventually wonders whether Nao conjured Ruth into being.
The connections between past and present are also examined. Nao discusses the difficulties of writing about the past: “Maybe that Nao of the past never really existed, except in the imagination of this Nao of the present. . . . 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.”
This is a complex metaphysical novel. Its references range from thirteenth-century Buddhist writings to quantum mechanics. The depth and breadth of the book should not, however, discourage potential readers. It is very readable. Anyone who watches The Big Bang Theory will be able to follow the discussions of quantum physics and the experiment involving Schrodinger’s cat!
Besides being able to explain some rather esoteric subjects, the author also has the ability to develop believable and likeable characters. Both Nao and Ruth become characters the reader will care about; both are developed so intricately that there is never any doubt that their behaviour is motivated and consistent with their personalities. I wondered whether I would find anything relatable in the diary of a suicidal teenager, but from the beginning I found myself drawn to this adolescent; I became as fascinated as Ruth is as she reads the diary.
This novel is very difficult to disentangle. The author briefly discusses “the interconnectedness of entanglement,” a principle of quantum mechanics, and her novel illustrates entanglement or intertwinement in that all elements work together to create a complex whole. Not one word or image is out of place; all contribute to the total meaning. The difficulty the reader or reviewer faces is doing justice to the book while discussing its separate elements.
This book is a must-read and will probably become a must-re-read for many. It is intelligent without being incomprehensible. It has everything: an interesting plot, credible and appealing characters, and thoroughly developed themes.
Note: I received a pre-release copy of this book from the publisher via netgalley.com
The plot seems simple. Nao Yasutani is a 16-year-old living in
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Tokyo in the early years of the twenty-first century. In a diary she is writing, she describes herself as a “time being” who has decided she is “going to drop out of time.” Before she commits suicide, however, she wants to write the life story of her great-grandmother, Yasutani Jiko, a Buddhist nun who was also a “novelist and New Woman of the Taisho era . . . an anarchist and a feminist.” Although we do meet Jiko and learn a bit about her, it is not her life story but Nao’s which fills the pages of the diary.About a decade later, after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan, on a remote island on British Columbia’s coast, Ruth discovers Nao’s diary, along with some other artifacts, inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Ruth, the novelist, becomes Nao’s reader. Ruth also becomes a detective of sorts as she tries to find out how the lunchbox found its way to her and what happened to Nao and her family.
That the book is a meditation on time is obvious from the beginning. The book’s title and the opening definition of a “time being” as “someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be” are the first clues. That Nao’s diary has the cover of Marcel Proust’s "À la recherche du temps perdu" is no coincidence. Included are quotes from an ancient Buddhist master: “Time itself is being . . . and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.”
As suggested by the above quotation, the interconnectedness of life is another major theme. For example, the book explores the connections between writer and reader. Nao claims that she and her reader together will “make magic” and Ruth eventually wonders whether Nao conjured Ruth into being.
The connections between past and present are also examined. Nao discusses the difficulties of writing about the past: “Maybe that Nao of the past never really existed, except in the imagination of this Nao of the present. . . . 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.”
This is a complex metaphysical novel. Its references range from thirteenth-century Buddhist writings to quantum mechanics. The depth and breadth of the book should not, however, discourage potential readers. It is very readable. Anyone who watches The Big Bang Theory will be able to follow the discussions of quantum physics and the experiment involving Schrodinger’s cat!
Besides being able to explain some rather esoteric subjects, the author also has the ability to develop believable and likeable characters. Both Nao and Ruth become characters the reader will care about; both are developed so intricately that there is never any doubt that their behaviour is motivated and consistent with their personalities. I wondered whether I would find anything relatable in the diary of a suicidal teenager, but from the beginning I found myself drawn to this adolescent; I became as fascinated as Ruth is as she reads the diary.
This novel is very difficult to disentangle. The author briefly discusses “the interconnectedness of entanglement,” a principle of quantum mechanics, and her novel illustrates entanglement or intertwinement in that all elements work together to create a complex whole. Not one word or image is out of place; all contribute to the total meaning. The difficulty the reader or reviewer faces is doing justice to the book while discussing its separate elements.
This book is a must-read and will probably become a must-re-read for many. It is intelligent without being incomprehensible. It has everything: an interesting plot, credible and appealing characters, and thoroughly developed themes.
Note: I received a pre-release copy of this book from the publisher via netgalley.com
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LibraryThing member andreablythe
“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.”
I delighted in this novel, the audio book of which is read by the author herself, who does a wonderful reading. The novel is told from two points of view — Ruth, a
There are so many layers to my love of this novel. The characters and their stories captivated me. Nao, who has faced such levels of bullying at school and sorrow at home, relates her decision to end her life in a straightforward manner. To her it is the only logical solution to what she's been through (and she's been through a lot). In her journal, she presents her life with a sense of self-depreciating humor. After all she's been through, and despite her resolution, there is an underlying strength to her. It's an interesting balance between depression, sorrow, and enjoyment of small moments.
Ruth is also fascinating to me. Her life is marked by less overt drama, and her story relates more of the small moments, the routines of her life that both provide her with contentment and feel like traps. As she explore's Nao's story through the journal and tries to seek a way to help this girl who lives across the sea, she finds certain threads of her own life loosening, creating their own minor havocs.
This novel is also meta, with multiple meanins available from different aspects of the story. One could start with the writer character, Ruth, who shares her name with the author of the book, which suggests the potential of the autobiographical slipping in even if none of it actually is such. Even the title A Tale for the Time Being has double meaning — as in both, a tale for a person who lives in time, and also a tale for right now. I don't want to get too much into the ways this is a meta narrative, since a lot of it comes at the end, but I will say that it had me thinking about the creation of art and degree to which the reader participates in the creation.
I think this is one of those books I'm going to have to reread from time to time, and I'm especially interested in reading the book on the page for the different experience from audio book (for example, "Nao" and "now" sound the same when they're read aloud, creating an interesting interchangeability to the meaning, which I wouldn't have gotten right away if I had read it in print first).
I delighted in this novel, the audio book of which is read by the author herself, who does a wonderful reading. The novel is told from two points of view — Ruth, a
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writer on a remote island who finds a mysterious packet in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, containing a journal and letters and other items, and Nao, living in Tokyo, whose story is told through the journal itself.There are so many layers to my love of this novel. The characters and their stories captivated me. Nao, who has faced such levels of bullying at school and sorrow at home, relates her decision to end her life in a straightforward manner. To her it is the only logical solution to what she's been through (and she's been through a lot). In her journal, she presents her life with a sense of self-depreciating humor. After all she's been through, and despite her resolution, there is an underlying strength to her. It's an interesting balance between depression, sorrow, and enjoyment of small moments.
Ruth is also fascinating to me. Her life is marked by less overt drama, and her story relates more of the small moments, the routines of her life that both provide her with contentment and feel like traps. As she explore's Nao's story through the journal and tries to seek a way to help this girl who lives across the sea, she finds certain threads of her own life loosening, creating their own minor havocs.
This novel is also meta, with multiple meanins available from different aspects of the story. One could start with the writer character, Ruth, who shares her name with the author of the book, which suggests the potential of the autobiographical slipping in even if none of it actually is such. Even the title A Tale for the Time Being has double meaning — as in both, a tale for a person who lives in time, and also a tale for right now. I don't want to get too much into the ways this is a meta narrative, since a lot of it comes at the end, but I will say that it had me thinking about the creation of art and degree to which the reader participates in the creation.
I think this is one of those books I'm going to have to reread from time to time, and I'm especially interested in reading the book on the page for the different experience from audio book (for example, "Nao" and "now" sound the same when they're read aloud, creating an interesting interchangeability to the meaning, which I wouldn't have gotten right away if I had read it in print first).
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LibraryThing member sleahey
Multi-faceted "I-novel" about an author who finds letters and a diary washed up the shore of the British Columbia island where she lives. As she reads these documents and becomes immersed in the story of Nao, a suicidal Japanese teen who is being brutally bullied, her own story unfolds. The themes
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and plot turns creep up on the reader, who also becomes entwined with the outcome. The abstractions of time and space and meditation are woven throughout the plot seamlessly. Show Less
LibraryThing member JaredOrlando
I don't like writing book reviews. The experience of reading is so individualistic that I feel it can be a waste of time. But I want to point out how excellent this book is. It forces you to think outside your comfort zone about death, about being, about not being. The characters are very likeable
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and the plot is surreal and imaginative. Beautiful, beautiful book. For fans of Haruki Murakami. Show Less
LibraryThing member 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
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 the dot com bubble sent the family back to Japan. She is the epitome of a stranger living in a strange land. She isn’t fluent in Japanese. She’s behind in school. And she is bullied. The bullying is relentless and harrowing. Her classmates even hold a fake funeral for her and put it on the internet.
Without consulting her, her parents decide to send her for the summer break to her great-grandmother Jiko, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun in a remote mountain location. This nun is the kind of fictional character who should exist in real life. She’s a spiritual Auntie Mame who helped form some of Nao’s father’s best memories as a boy and is showing, not telling, her great-granddaughter the power of zazen, a method of meditation. She also hopes Nao develops a superpower.
Ruth could use the power of meditation. She’s been trying to write a memoir of her mother, who died several years ago after suffering from Alzheimer’s, but has been stalled for ages. As a writer, she knows this is not healthy:
An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will, and ruthless determination to tame it again.
Instead of her own work, Ruth is captivated by Nao and worries about her, even though the journal was written years ago. It may have reached Canada in the vanguard of debris drifting over after the tsunami and Fuskushima disaster, which is ongoing.
Ruth doesn’t even know if Nao is still alive. She not only wrote about killing herself, her father is sinking into depression ever more deeply because he cannot find work after they return to Japan. He isn’t even successful at killing himself. He does roam the streets at night, and sometimes Nao follows him. These sections are highly reminiscent of Murakami’s writing, especially in 1Q84 during night sessions involving a playground swing in the middle of a metropolis. Ruth also is having a hard time finding evidence online that Nao is real.
Meanwhile, Nao plans to write a biography of Jiko but like Ruth, she gets off-track and the work is not done. Jiko admires early Japanese feminists, and may or may not have written an “I-novel”, an early form of Japanese confessional fiction. Is this what Nao’s journal is? She is deliberately reaching out to someone who will one day read what she has written:
Maybe when I ask you a question like “You doing okay?” you should just tell me, even if I can’t hear you, and then I’ll just sit here and imagine what you might say. You might say, “Sure thing, Nao. I’m okay. I’m doin’ just fine.”
Is she practicing I-fiction or trying to find someone, anyone, since her new life is so desolate?
While Nao’s father is trying to commit suicide, the reader also learns about Jiko’s son. He was a kamikaze pilot during World War II. But he also was a scholar, a lover of French literature and poetry. Writings of his also surface.
Perhaps it is inevitable, but there is an element of the fantastical toward the end of the novel before Ozeki brings everything back together. I can’t say much without going into spoilers but again, it felt like wandering into Murakami territory and it felt right.
Ozeki weaves in ideas about bullies, both personal and corporate, sustainability, old growth and how to live at peace in the multiple POV narrative that doesn’t feel forced. There is ultimately a calmness that the writing delivers, and it has to do with realizing how connected we all are.
This foundation also provides an
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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 the dot com bubble sent the family back to Japan. She is the epitome of a stranger living in a strange land. She isn’t fluent in Japanese. She’s behind in school. And she is bullied. The bullying is relentless and harrowing. Her classmates even hold a fake funeral for her and put it on the internet.
Without consulting her, her parents decide to send her for the summer break to her great-grandmother Jiko, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun in a remote mountain location. This nun is the kind of fictional character who should exist in real life. She’s a spiritual Auntie Mame who helped form some of Nao’s father’s best memories as a boy and is showing, not telling, her great-granddaughter the power of zazen, a method of meditation. She also hopes Nao develops a superpower.
Ruth could use the power of meditation. She’s been trying to write a memoir of her mother, who died several years ago after suffering from Alzheimer’s, but has been stalled for ages. As a writer, she knows this is not healthy:
An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will, and ruthless determination to tame it again.
Instead of her own work, Ruth is captivated by Nao and worries about her, even though the journal was written years ago. It may have reached Canada in the vanguard of debris drifting over after the tsunami and Fuskushima disaster, which is ongoing.
Ruth doesn’t even know if Nao is still alive. She not only wrote about killing herself, her father is sinking into depression ever more deeply because he cannot find work after they return to Japan. He isn’t even successful at killing himself. He does roam the streets at night, and sometimes Nao follows him. These sections are highly reminiscent of Murakami’s writing, especially in 1Q84 during night sessions involving a playground swing in the middle of a metropolis. Ruth also is having a hard time finding evidence online that Nao is real.
Meanwhile, Nao plans to write a biography of Jiko but like Ruth, she gets off-track and the work is not done. Jiko admires early Japanese feminists, and may or may not have written an “I-novel”, an early form of Japanese confessional fiction. Is this what Nao’s journal is? She is deliberately reaching out to someone who will one day read what she has written:
Maybe when I ask you a question like “You doing okay?” you should just tell me, even if I can’t hear you, and then I’ll just sit here and imagine what you might say. You might say, “Sure thing, Nao. I’m okay. I’m doin’ just fine.”
Is she practicing I-fiction or trying to find someone, anyone, since her new life is so desolate?
While Nao’s father is trying to commit suicide, the reader also learns about Jiko’s son. He was a kamikaze pilot during World War II. But he also was a scholar, a lover of French literature and poetry. Writings of his also surface.
Perhaps it is inevitable, but there is an element of the fantastical toward the end of the novel before Ozeki brings everything back together. I can’t say much without going into spoilers but again, it felt like wandering into Murakami territory and it felt right.
Ozeki weaves in ideas about bullies, both personal and corporate, sustainability, old growth and how to live at peace in the multiple POV narrative that doesn’t feel forced. There is ultimately a calmness that the writing delivers, and it has to do with realizing how connected we all are.
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LibraryThing member freelancer_frank
This is a book about Zen, power and the Japanese experience. Ozeki neatly connects the notion of communication through time to Zen Buddhism and the act of writing/reading by setting up a three-way discussion between her two main characters and the books reader. The discussion ranges over space and
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time so that the story takes on a meditative and expansive feel, much like meditation. Internally, there are insights into coding, World War II, dreams, island life and bullying. The work stands poised over the twin poles of cruelty and illumination. Show Less
LibraryThing member LDVoorberg
This is a long one, two narratives -- Nao's and Ruth's -- spun together. There's a lot in it. Quantum physics, tides and weather patterns in the ocean, historical events like WWII and the earthquake/tsunami in Japan, Japanese Buddhism/mysticism, bullying, suicide, writing and literature, Biology,
The ending was less concrete than I expected, but I suppose that's the author's way of letting the reader interpret the events and their unfolding.
This would make a good novel study or book club discussion, since there is SO MUCH to discuss. It would be fitting to keep a diary about reading this book.
PS I've often said I don't like authors reading their own book for the audio version, but Ruth does a great job, so don't worry there.
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Alzheimer's, invasive species, French literature, philosophy...I am impressed by how much the author knows and/or researched.The ending was less concrete than I expected, but I suppose that's the author's way of letting the reader interpret the events and their unfolding.
This would make a good novel study or book club discussion, since there is SO MUCH to discuss. It would be fitting to keep a diary about reading this book.
PS I've often said I don't like authors reading their own book for the audio version, but Ruth does a great job, so don't worry there.
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LibraryThing member kvrfan
Two stories converge in this book: that of a teenage Japanese girl and a Canadian novelist who find the girl's diary washed up on the beach in a plastic bag. Without ever meeting the other, their two lives become strangely interwoven. Quantum mechanics may even play a role in making it so.
That's a
I loved the voice of the teen. It sounded just right. There's a breeziness to it. But there's thoughtfulness, too. After all, she is an outsider, having been raised in the States and only brought back to live in Japan once her family becomes ruined by the bursting dot-com bubble. She is bullied, she has father who has attempted suicide, and she contemplates suicide hereself.
But then she has that great-grandmother of hers. And an unknown friend across the Pacific reading her diary who also cares for her and who will have an effect on her life in a way neither of them will fully understand.
Great story. Great characters. Recommended.
That's a
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very dry summary of this book. But rest assured, the book is not dry at all. It also includes, for instance, the teen's great-grandmother, who was a pre-World War II anarchist, feminist, and novelist, and who after the war become a Zen Buddhist nun. The teen's uncle, a kamakaze pilot, through his diaries (and a ghost?) also makes an appearance.I loved the voice of the teen. It sounded just right. There's a breeziness to it. But there's thoughtfulness, too. After all, she is an outsider, having been raised in the States and only brought back to live in Japan once her family becomes ruined by the bursting dot-com bubble. She is bullied, she has father who has attempted suicide, and she contemplates suicide hereself.
But then she has that great-grandmother of hers. And an unknown friend across the Pacific reading her diary who also cares for her and who will have an effect on her life in a way neither of them will fully understand.
Great story. Great characters. Recommended.
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LibraryThing member sturlington
A writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia finds a package washed ashore from Japan containing a diary and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to the teenage girl who wrote it.
This was an absorbing, multilayered story, and I absolutely loved it. The settings
Read in 2015.
This was an absorbing, multilayered story, and I absolutely loved it. The settings
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were so vividly drawn that they enchanted me: a remote Canadian island frequently cut off by storms; the very strange Akiba district of Tokyo with its French-style cafes; a remote Buddhist monastery. Yet even more captivating was puzzling over whether the events being related were what was actually happening. The main character, Ruth, seems a stand-in for the author herself, but how much of the living author is actually part of the character? Was Naoko, the Japanese girl, killed in the tsunami of 2011, or did she survive? Is her diary even real or is it fictional? And if it is, who is its real writer? Perhaps it's all true, all at once. Yes, quantum theory and the multiverse does come into this, which I love, if the author can pull it off. Ozeki does pull it off splendidly--at least for me she did. This is my favorite kind of story, one that plays with reality and the conceits of fiction in new and risky ways, capturing my imagination and keeping me pondering long after I've closed the book.Read in 2015.
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LibraryThing member HelenGress
Part of the pleasure in this book for me is the context of my life-- searching to hold onto a relationship which will soon become memory-- reaching through time to hold onto and learn more from a wise and loved mother while I still have her. I sympathized with Ruth's grief over her mother- a small
I have recently read Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala- a memoire of a woman who lost everything in the 2004 Tsunami-- and perhaps the enormity of her story colored my interpretation of this book as well
I was very taken with the book's premises - the convergence of flotsam and jetsam; the physical and also symbolic realities of the book, the watch, and the transplanted life; the blend of suspense and the reveal; the cultural explanations and the two viewpoints... like other commentators- I found the ending lacking- but I fail to come up with a better idea myself.
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sideline of the book-- but one that resonated with me.I have recently read Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala- a memoire of a woman who lost everything in the 2004 Tsunami-- and perhaps the enormity of her story colored my interpretation of this book as well
I was very taken with the book's premises - the convergence of flotsam and jetsam; the physical and also symbolic realities of the book, the watch, and the transplanted life; the blend of suspense and the reveal; the cultural explanations and the two viewpoints... like other commentators- I found the ending lacking- but I fail to come up with a better idea myself.
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LibraryThing member julie10reads
Ozeki's beautifully crafted work strives to unravel the mystery of a 16-year-old Japanese American girl's diary found washed ashore in Whaletown, British Columbia. Born in Sunnyvale, CA, Nao logs her diary entries from Japan since her father returned the family there following the burst of the
Long, long narrative from 2 POVs: Nao, a Japanese teenager recording in her diary and Ruth, the author who finds Nao's diary washed up ashore in British Columbia. I listened to the author read the novel for 2 weeks, then finished the hard copy on my own. I have mixed feelings about A Tale for the Time Being: had I read it instead of listening, I would have been able to skip the repetitive bits. But would I have finished it? Don't know. I didn't skip any of the audiobook but feel that I could have without losing track of the story. It was helpful to hear the Japanese spoken.
Nao's diary could have been a novel in itself, a real teenager's take on moving from California to Japan when her father loses his job. Her low status at school inevitably makes her an ideal victim of peer harassment and cruelty. She describes a summer spent with her 104 year old grandmother at a Buddhist shrine: sitting zazen, preparing meals together, bathing together. Some beautiful conversations about perception and reality unfold here. Gritty and philosophical, questioning and judging, Nao's diary allows the western reader to view teenaged society in modern day Japan.
Ruth and Oliver's island life is interesting too, especially if the reader is interested in BC flora and fauna. Ms Ozeki endows Oliver with a somewhat pedantic bent; the "joke" being that "Oliver" is the name of the author's husband. Their story, too, could have been its own book. Maybe I am missing the point?
Helpful appendices wait at the end of the book for those readers who need more information about topics such as quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat and parallel universes. Not your summer beach read!
7 out of 10 For readers who enjoy philosophy, nature, conservationism, Japanese culture and the properties of time.
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dot-com bubble. Ozeki creates a host of colorful tales surrounding Nao and her 104-year-old great-grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun, and great uncle Haruki, who was a kamikaze pilot in World War II. Meanwhile, in Canada, author Ruth and her husband, Oliver, are reading Nao's entries in the year 2012, wondering whether the diary is debris from the devastating tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, and whether Nao is still alive. Summary BPL Long, long narrative from 2 POVs: Nao, a Japanese teenager recording in her diary and Ruth, the author who finds Nao's diary washed up ashore in British Columbia. I listened to the author read the novel for 2 weeks, then finished the hard copy on my own. I have mixed feelings about A Tale for the Time Being: had I read it instead of listening, I would have been able to skip the repetitive bits. But would I have finished it? Don't know. I didn't skip any of the audiobook but feel that I could have without losing track of the story. It was helpful to hear the Japanese spoken.
Nao's diary could have been a novel in itself, a real teenager's take on moving from California to Japan when her father loses his job. Her low status at school inevitably makes her an ideal victim of peer harassment and cruelty. She describes a summer spent with her 104 year old grandmother at a Buddhist shrine: sitting zazen, preparing meals together, bathing together. Some beautiful conversations about perception and reality unfold here. Gritty and philosophical, questioning and judging, Nao's diary allows the western reader to view teenaged society in modern day Japan.
Ruth and Oliver's island life is interesting too, especially if the reader is interested in BC flora and fauna. Ms Ozeki endows Oliver with a somewhat pedantic bent; the "joke" being that "Oliver" is the name of the author's husband. Their story, too, could have been its own book. Maybe I am missing the point?
Helpful appendices wait at the end of the book for those readers who need more information about topics such as quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat and parallel universes. Not your summer beach read!
7 out of 10 For readers who enjoy philosophy, nature, conservationism, Japanese culture and the properties of time.
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LibraryThing member 2chances
The time being is a transient thing, a thing that changes completely with every moment. But it is also, as 16-year-old Naoko Yusitani explains in her diary, a being who lives in time, and the truth, she tells us, is that "very soon I will graduate from time...Time out. Exit my existence. I'm
Nao's diary has washed up on an island in the Pacific Northwest, carefully wrapped in a Hello Kitty lunchbox with some letters, a watch, and other papers. Ruth, married to Oliver and trying to adjust to living in the wild isolation of the island, wonders if Nao's diary is flotsam from the tsunami of 2011, a little time capsule of a young girl's life. Ruth quickly becomes obsessed with Nao's very present-sounding life: the brutal bullying she endures, her father's misery over not finding a job, her mother's urgent need for Nao to be okay when Nao is very obviously not okay.
Ruth Ozeki (who ALSO is married to a man named Oliver and also lives on an island) does a fantastic job of luring her reader into both Nao and Ruth's lives, of making every moment so present and powerful that I found myself unable to read at any pace but the pace Ozeki dictated - racing ahead as Nao hurtles toward disaster, slowing down as Ruth struggles to make sense of what she is reading. This is a book to savor, and think about, and think about some more. I will be re-reading.
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counting the moments." But for the time being, the reader has Nao's very present words and thoughts and Nao is just so amazing, you can't let her end her existence. She HAS to live.Nao's diary has washed up on an island in the Pacific Northwest, carefully wrapped in a Hello Kitty lunchbox with some letters, a watch, and other papers. Ruth, married to Oliver and trying to adjust to living in the wild isolation of the island, wonders if Nao's diary is flotsam from the tsunami of 2011, a little time capsule of a young girl's life. Ruth quickly becomes obsessed with Nao's very present-sounding life: the brutal bullying she endures, her father's misery over not finding a job, her mother's urgent need for Nao to be okay when Nao is very obviously not okay.
Ruth Ozeki (who ALSO is married to a man named Oliver and also lives on an island) does a fantastic job of luring her reader into both Nao and Ruth's lives, of making every moment so present and powerful that I found myself unable to read at any pace but the pace Ozeki dictated - racing ahead as Nao hurtles toward disaster, slowing down as Ruth struggles to make sense of what she is reading. This is a book to savor, and think about, and think about some more. I will be re-reading.
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LibraryThing member gypsysmom
Every once in a while a book takes you totally by surprise and that's what happened for me with this book. I really didn't know much about this book except that it was on the list CBC put together of 100 Novels that Make you Proud to be Canadian. When I saw that the audiobook was read by the author
Ruth (the fictional Ruth but also the author Ruth) lives on an island off the coast of BC with her husband and their cat. She is out walking the beach one day after a storm and finds a package containing a Hello Kitty lunchbox with a collection of artifacts inside. This is a few years after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that decimated a large section of Japan and caused the nuclear power plant at Fukushima to fail. At first Ruth thinks the package might be debris from the tsunami. As she starts to read the journal which is one of the things inside the lunchbox she wonders if it might have been cast deliberately into the ocean by the teenage writer of the journal. Nao, although Japanese by birth, lived most of her life in California where her father worked in the computer industry. Then her father lost his job and they had to move back to Tokyo where Nao is an outsider. She is bullied and harrassed and abused by the others at school and she is deeply unhappy. On top of this her father, who has not been able to find a job, is suicidal. Nao writes that she is going to commit suicide as well but she wants to write her life story first. In fact, she really wants to write the story of her great-grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun who has witnessed much horror in her 104 years but who still reveres life. Nao spent one summer with Jiko and she learned a lot from her but it still didn't change the decision to commit suicide.
As Nao's journal is revealed we also learn about Ruth who is a writer with a serious writer's block. Is she using Nao's journal to distract herself from the block or is it helping her face her own demons. Ruth is also Japanese-American and knows the feeling of not being part of either culture. At one point as she is reading the journal she discovers that the last pages are blank although when she first looked through the book the writing went all the way to the last page. There is a little bit of magical realism used to solve this quandary. Normally I am not a fan of that writing style but it works here and gave the book an added depth.
A truly fascinating book.
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I decided that would be how I would "read" it. Listening to this book added a dimension that would be missed in reading it because there are so many words and phrases in Japanese. Although they are almost always translated I know from reading other books with Japanese words that I stumble over them because I am not sure how to pronounce them. At the end Ozeki says each version (print and audio) bring something different to the experience so maybe I'll have to read it too.Ruth (the fictional Ruth but also the author Ruth) lives on an island off the coast of BC with her husband and their cat. She is out walking the beach one day after a storm and finds a package containing a Hello Kitty lunchbox with a collection of artifacts inside. This is a few years after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that decimated a large section of Japan and caused the nuclear power plant at Fukushima to fail. At first Ruth thinks the package might be debris from the tsunami. As she starts to read the journal which is one of the things inside the lunchbox she wonders if it might have been cast deliberately into the ocean by the teenage writer of the journal. Nao, although Japanese by birth, lived most of her life in California where her father worked in the computer industry. Then her father lost his job and they had to move back to Tokyo where Nao is an outsider. She is bullied and harrassed and abused by the others at school and she is deeply unhappy. On top of this her father, who has not been able to find a job, is suicidal. Nao writes that she is going to commit suicide as well but she wants to write her life story first. In fact, she really wants to write the story of her great-grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun who has witnessed much horror in her 104 years but who still reveres life. Nao spent one summer with Jiko and she learned a lot from her but it still didn't change the decision to commit suicide.
As Nao's journal is revealed we also learn about Ruth who is a writer with a serious writer's block. Is she using Nao's journal to distract herself from the block or is it helping her face her own demons. Ruth is also Japanese-American and knows the feeling of not being part of either culture. At one point as she is reading the journal she discovers that the last pages are blank although when she first looked through the book the writing went all the way to the last page. There is a little bit of magical realism used to solve this quandary. Normally I am not a fan of that writing style but it works here and gave the book an added depth.
A truly fascinating book.
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Subjects
Awards
Booker Prize (Longlist — 2013)
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2015)
LA Times Book Prize (Finalist — Fiction — 2013)
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Fiction — 2013)
The Morning News Tournament of Books (Quarterfinalist — 2014)
Sunburst Award (Winner — Adult — 2014)
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award (Winner — 2014)
Independent Booksellers' Book Prize (Winner — 2013)
Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (Winner — Adult Fiction — 2014)
Maine Readers' Choice Award (Longlist — 2014)
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction (Longlist — Fiction — 2014)
CBC Bookie Awards (Nominee — 2014)
The Kitschies (Winner — 2013)
Canada-Japan Book Award (2014)
Booklist Editor's Choice: Adult Books (Fiction — 2013)
NPR: Books We Love (2013)
Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (General Fiction — 2013)
Christian Science Monitor Best Book (Fiction — 2013)
Notable Books List (Fiction — 2014)
Globe and Mail Top 100 Book (2013)
Language
Original publication date
2013-03-22
Physical description
422 p.; 24 cm
ISBN
9780670026630
Local notes
fiction
Other editions
A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel by Ruth Ozeki (Paperback)