It no longer made any sense at all.Įarly reviews of Ms. And I realized that the book I had just written was irrelevant. Ozeki, a thin, intense 57-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair and a disarmingly direct gaze. “Then the earthquake and tsunami hit,” said Ms. Ozeki began in 2006 was not cooked to her satisfaction when she handed it over to her editor in early 2011, already a long time after her last novel, “All Over Creation,” came out in 2003. Along the way the novel considers Buddhism, the writer-reader relationship and the nature of time.

Ozeki’s third novel, alternates between Nao’s purple squiggles and the story of Ruth, who finds the journal and sets out to discover its writer’s fate. And she had a devil of a time conjuring the character who would find Nao’s diary washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox on an island off British Columbia. Ozeki to round out the story.įor one thing, she was caught in “a bit of a grief fog” after her mother’s death from cancer, she said. But it took five frustrating years for Ms. The voice of the quirky, troubled 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl whose words begin “A Tale for the Time Being,” Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, came to the author as she was immersed in a Buddhist teaching. Full of Ozeki's signature humor 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.Nao was easy. 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. 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. A diary is Nao's only solace-and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century.

A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness Finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award 'A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.' In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying.

A tale for the time being a novel