A Tale for the Time Being
/ Ruth Ozeki
My quest for another Japan also led me to Ruth Ozeki's A Tale For the Time Being, which was recommended by a woman I play soccer with. It was my first Ozeki, and it felt significant. A Tale for the Time Being is an overwhelming and beautiful book—a long, layered evocation of decades of Japanese history. It’s about a Japanese-American writer, Ruth, who discovers a diary written by a 16-year-old girl in Japan when it washes up on shore near her Canadian house following the tsunami. The bullied teenage diarist plans to kill herself after writing the story of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun, and the contemporary writer Ruth becomes obsessed with the diary, the nun, and where she fits in this saga.
This book may reinforce another set of simplified Japanese tropes (suicide, kamikaze pilots, sexual perversions), but there is much else here. Everything about the book that sounds difficult to pull off is rather miraculously pulled off. It’s a marvel of a kind of philosophical storytelling, and I was awed by it. I was somehow not surprised to learn while reading that Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist priest.
—Nina Renata-Aron/ Reviewed January 2020DECEMBER 3, 2013 / PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE/
352 PAGES