A Tale for the Time Being

Hardcover, 422 pages

English language

Published Jan. 1, 2013 by Viking.

ISBN:: 978-0-670-02663-0

(2 reviews)

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine.

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. 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.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humour 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 …

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine.

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. 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.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humour 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.

1 edition

pdotb reviewed A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Good until the deus ex machina

4 stars

Content warning spoilers, cw: suicide, bullying, sexual assault

I'm a bit torn as to how to review this. It was all going so well until the last fifty pages or so. Well, two of the main characters are suicidal for much of the book, and there's some pretty awful bullying going on, but it's still, somehow, enjoyable. All of a sudden things are neatly tied up by an intervention that comes out of nowhere, and then we're off into QM and Schrödinger's cat, and Everett's many-worlds interpretation, and I'm just wondering where the novel went to...

Kadomi reviewed A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Review of 'A Tale for the Time Being' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A bit of a bleak story that I liked alright but which didn't sweep me off my feet. Japanese-American Ruth who lives on a remote Canadian island finds the diary of a Japanese teenager and is fully engrossed in Nao's story. Nao suffers from bullying at school, and has a suicidal, depressed father. She only takes joy in her 104 year old great-grandmother who is a Buddhist nun. We also learn a lot about Nao's uncle, a kamikaze pilot in WWII. Truly bleak stuff.

I have nothing else to say about it other than a vague feeling of confusion about the 'time being' parts at the end. I liked it enough, and that's about all I can say here.