A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozaki

Ozeki's book opens with an entry from a diary by Nao Yasutani, a 15 year old Japanese girl living in Tokyo.  She introduces herself as a time being and says that we are all time beings, that is, creatures living within and defined by time.  She draws our attention to the dual meaning of Ozeki's title, we are time beings but also the phrase 'For The Time Being' means 'just for now', again a play on Nao's name.

Next we are introduced to a second first person narrator, Ruth herself finding Nao's diary on the beach of her isolated island in British Columbia, across the Pacific from Japan.  Is this the Ruth writing the book or another, it's not clear?  How did the diary get to British Columbia?

Twin narratives unfold, of Ruth, a Japanese American living with her partner Oliver in the wilderness but pining for New York, and Nao, raised in California but forced to move to Japan when the dotcom bubble burst and her father lost everything. 

Nao struggles to adjust to life in a Japanese high school and is bullied viciously.  After her school perform a mock funeral for Nao in an act of ultimate ostracism her father Hiroki #2, who is suicidal for much of the novel, takes Nao to live for the summer with his grandmother Jiko.  Jiko is an ancient buddhist nun who with gentle kindness, exercise and meditation helps Nao find peace with herself.  And and through Jiko a connection is made to Hiroki #1, Juki's son and Nao's father's uncle, a kamikaze bomber but also deeply thoughful intellectual who died in the Second World War. 

Ruth struggles with her loneliness and with her neighbours, and remembers caring for her own mother through her descent into alzheimers, unravelling in time.  They have a visitor, a Japanese crow that perhaps came over on the tsunami wreckage, but is certainly not indigenous and somehow links to Nao's story.

Ozaki shows us things and events from both sides, 9/11 is witnessed by both sets of characters from opposite sides of the ocean.  The things that happen to Nao are both sad and to me unacceptable but Ozaki is deft at helping us realise that perhaps our constructions of what is and is not acceptable are at heart cultural.  As a Westerner I learned so much about the differences between Japanese and American culture, between collectivism and conformism versus rampant individualism. 

Towards the end of the novel things begin to break down and Ozeki playfully shows us the constructed nature of her tale, things begin to appear where they cannot be, the two stories begin to merge and unravel and a cat is rescued.

I simply can't wait to read more of this author, this is a beguiling haunting book which I really enjoyed.