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In Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, Nao is lost in her time and found in ours. She is an excitable Japanese adolescent whose personal effects are jettisoned onto the shores of a secluded island near British Columbia. While walking along the beach, Ruth, a struggling writer, happens upon a sealed plastic bag that had protected a book by Marcel Proust, a number of handwritten letters, and a sun watch from the erosive seawater during its wayward journey. Ruth takes the bag home and spearheads the rescue of Nao’s material remains.
When Ruth opens the
hollowed out edition of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to
discover the dense French prose replaced by white pages filled with bubbly,
purple handwriting, the reader is immediately swept up into the narrative magic
of this novel.
Nao makes an alarming announcement to the unknown reader of her diary: she is going to kill herself ("I think it's important to have clearly defined goals in life, don't you?"), but she wishes to record the story of her feminist Buddhist nun grandmother before she commits the act. Nao's father is also suicidal after getting fired from his tech job in Silicon Valley and having to move his wife and daughter back to Japan in the early 2000s with no money or job prospects. In her home country, Nao is brutally bullied by her classmates who can't relate to her American upbringing and is swindled into becoming a "comfort girl."
The novel switches between Nao and Ruth’s points of view, and Ruth burdens herself with figuring out if Nao is even real, if she's alive, or if she perished in the Japanese tsunami in 2006.
Fair warning - this novel isn't easy to digest. WWII kamikaze pilots, quantum physics, and permaculture all make esoteric appearances as Ozeki releases an onslaught of intersectional knowledge that, I suspect, isn't meant to be entirely understood at first read. This novel should be picked up more than once.
One of the more obscure topics readers are introduced to is time-being. At the beginning of the book, Nao defines herself as a Time-Being, or "“someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every
one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”
Her definition is inspired from a fascicle written by notable Buddhist Zen master, Dogen, in the mid-1200s. He asserts that time isn’t just linear and measured by hours in the day. Our existence/being is time and inscribed on our bodies, in objects, etc. My elementary grasp on this is that past, present, and future times are implicitly enfolded in “the now.” For example, I'm looking at my hand right now. The lines in the knuckle, though sparse, remind me that I was once a young child who didn't have wrinkles there. It also reminds me that I will continue to grow and pass through time until I'm an elderly woman with lots of wrinkles on her hand. Basically, my hand holds all the time I've accumulated and all the time in front of me, even though the past and future aren't visually present in the now.
Nao’s voice is so emotional, so poignant, and so present that she does evade traditional concepts of time. As I began reading her diary, I truly felt like I was sitting across from her at a cafe, listening intently as she described the fake funeral her cruel classmates put on and shared her feelings of disgust when a desperate man mounted her in a seedy room. The reader's connection with Nao allows her to be present and alive in the reader's time, despite clues that heavily suggest Nao's death.
There's a lot that inside A Tale for the Time Being that I couldn't adequately describe so pick this one up and see for yourself. It requires you to be a pretty active reader, but the payoff is so worth it.
Next week's review: Caucasia by Danzy Senna
Her definition is inspired from a fascicle written by notable Buddhist Zen master, Dogen, in the mid-1200s. He asserts that time isn’t just linear and measured by hours in the day. Our existence/being is time and inscribed on our bodies, in objects, etc. My elementary grasp on this is that past, present, and future times are implicitly enfolded in “the now.” For example, I'm looking at my hand right now. The lines in the knuckle, though sparse, remind me that I was once a young child who didn't have wrinkles there. It also reminds me that I will continue to grow and pass through time until I'm an elderly woman with lots of wrinkles on her hand. Basically, my hand holds all the time I've accumulated and all the time in front of me, even though the past and future aren't visually present in the now.
Nao’s voice is so emotional, so poignant, and so present that she does evade traditional concepts of time. As I began reading her diary, I truly felt like I was sitting across from her at a cafe, listening intently as she described the fake funeral her cruel classmates put on and shared her feelings of disgust when a desperate man mounted her in a seedy room. The reader's connection with Nao allows her to be present and alive in the reader's time, despite clues that heavily suggest Nao's death.
There's a lot that inside A Tale for the Time Being that I couldn't adequately describe so pick this one up and see for yourself. It requires you to be a pretty active reader, but the payoff is so worth it.
Next week's review: Caucasia by Danzy Senna
