all drawn into the stories of two ‘time beings,’ Ruth and Nao, whose own fates are inextricably bound.” Many of the elements 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. “A delightful yet sometimes harrowing novel . . . “Plunges us into a tantalizing narration that brandishes mysteries to be solved and ideas to be explored.” Dualities, overlaps, time shifts, and coincidences are the currents that move A Tale for the Time Being along: This is a book that does not give up its multiple meanings easily, gently but insistently instructing the reader to progress slowly in order to contemplate the porous membrane that separates fact from fiction, self from circumstance, past from present.” “Nao’s lively voice, by turns breezy, petulant, funny, sad, and teenage-girl wise, reaches the reader in the pages of her diary, which, as Ruth Ozeki begins to fold and pleat her intricate parable of a novel, washes ashore, safe in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, on a small Canadian island off the coast of British Columbia. . . .

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As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.įull of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox-possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. A diary is Nao’s only solace-and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. “A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”

A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki-shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

A tale for the time being a novel