It's ridiculous! Some psychic, whimsical, Then Ruth's dream sequence comes up and ugh it damn near ruins the bloody book. Till about the second half of part 3, I was all set to give this rave reviews 'cause Nao's story was so compelling and well written plus there wasn't enough of Ruth's woeful tone to grate on the nerves. And I love the philosophical underpinnings of this novel, the way it keeps slipping back to questions about time.Dammit this should have been at least a 4 star book! Although Ozeki has made herself a character in her own novel, you don’t always get the feeling that she wants to be there. A Tale for the Time Being can be really beautiful, but sometimes it falters, with a palpable lack of confidence.
I liked this book a lot, but I can see how Ozeki has developed as a novelist in her more recent novel The Book of Form and Emptiness. Jiko is a great character, wise and occasionally enigmatic but still very human. The only bright spot for Nao is when she is taken out to the country to spend the summer with her great-grandmother Jiko, an aged Buddhist nun. Her father is despondent after he loses another job, and he makes several failed attempts to commit suicide.
She’s living with her parents in a tiny, cheap apartment in Tokyo, and she’s bullied and abused by her classmates, who see her as foreign. She’s a 15 year old girl who has been transplanted from California, after her father lost his job and all his money in the dot-com bust.
The entries, written by Nao, are quite haunting. She reads it slowly, entry by entry, sharing the entries with the reader, and these alternate with her own feelings and daily struggles. Instead she’s distracted by this journal, which is accompanied by a bunch of letters and a wristwatch. She's been transplanted from a Manhattan life, and is still finding her footing, and she’s struggling to write a memoir. Like the author, Ruth is married to a man named Oliver, and they live on a small, rather rustic island in British Colombia. The journal was written by Nao, a Japanese teenager wrestling with some serious problems. It moves back and forth between the two, connecting them by way of a journal which has washed up on a beach near Ruth's home, preserved in a freezer bag. It’s quite experimental in form, partly a work of historical fiction and partly a lightly fictionalized memoir.
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