“Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you”, are the first lines of the diary that has washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox on the coast of an island in British Columbia, not too far from Japan. The diary is found by Ruth, a young Japanese-American novelist struggling to complete her memoir and feeling adrift from civilization while living on the secluded island. Ruth becomes fascinated by her discovery, which includes the diary, some letters written in French and Japanese, as well as an old watch. Ruth becomes obsessed with unravelling the identity of Nao, the diary’s author, and finding out if this sixteen year old who had written so candidly in the diary was still alive, or if she had been killed by the deadly tsunami that hit Tokyo just years before. Ruth begins to slowly unravel the tale of Nao Yasutani, who has just moved back to Japan after her father lost his job in Silicon Valley. Nao considers herself to be American, and the shifting of her family’s fortunes from an upwardly mobile American family to a family deprived from their savings and lifestyle living in a crappy apartment in Japan has clearly traumatized her.
This is the basis for Ruth Ozeki’s fascinating novel, A Tale for the Time Being, where the lives of these two women, Nao and Ruth, come to be entangled. The two are fascinated by time: the diary is a craft book with the cover of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, filled with blank pages that have been populated by Nao’s diary entries. Nao writes in the early pages of the diary that she is running out of time, she plans to commit suicide after writing down the story for her 104 year old great grandmother Old Jiko, an feminist anarchist writer and Buddhist nun. Old Jiko seems to be the only individual in Nao’s life that she feels a connection with—Nao’s father Haruki is unable to hold a job and has made multiple suicide attempts after losing his job in America and squandering his family money, and Nao’s mother becomes the sole breadwinner of the family, meaning she is constantly working overtime. Nao is bullied mercilessly by her Japanese classmates because of her American-ness and poverty, and her diary entries contain many heartbreaking scenes of the violence inflicted upon her by these ignorant children. Nao’s entries are both witty and heartbreaking, as she has adopted a dry but humorous tone in describing the traumas that her family has experienced, and her complicated relationship with her father.
As the diary progresses, Ruth joins Nao in her quest to understand her family further, and Ruth eventually learns that the watch in the lunchbox actually belonged to Haruki #1, Old Jiko’s son and Nao’s father Haruki #2’s namesake, a Japanese kamikaze pilot who died in a suicide mission in World War II. Nao, and by extension Ruth, become fascinated by this Haruki #1, whom Nao believes to be a war hero who sacrificed his life for his country, unlike his nephew named for him, whom Nao believes to be a selfish loser. Nao writes about the summer she went to go visit Old Jiko at her Buddhist temple, and the healing power of her great-grandmother’s teaching. Due to her grief and violence-filled daily life, Nao had created a hard exterior to cope, and only through the companionship of Old Jiko is she able to break the isolation that has so defined her upbringing. Ruth begins to have dreams about Old Jiko, as the lines between her and Nao’s life start to blur. The novel settles upon themes of time, isolation, womanhood, family history, and identity to connect the narratives of Ruth and Nao: two people who are themselves searching for lost time, but also searching for a home inside themselves.
A Tale for the Time Being is a novel about a great many things, but most poignantly about the heroic nature of choosing life and connection. The lessons that Nao and her father learn from Old Jiko and Haruki #1 emphasize the importance of living for others, about reaching out when you feel alone. Old Jiko’s compassionate training in meditation and self-possession allow Nao to survive traumatic abuse at the hands of her classmates, and discover her “superpower”: finding her own peace and helping her father find his purpose. The novel is a meta-commentary on the connective ability of writing, and the spiritual collaboration between the writer and reader in crafting a story, and while Ruth and Nao never meet, their relationship is one of the most richly textured and fascinating pieces of the novel. A Tale for the Time Being is ultimately about what it means to trust other people with your story, and the virtue of vulnerability in storytelling. Ozeki’s novel is a landmark achievement of metafiction and narrative intimacy, and one that manages to create texture with each reader’s interpretation.
Further Reading: Ozeki’s other novels, My Year of Meats and All over Creation, are also exquisite narratives featuring Japanese American characters.