On the Shelf: A Tale for the Time Being

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING | RUTH OZEKI | VIKING CANADA (PENGUIN) | MARCH 2013

“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. 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.

This is an absolutely beautiful book. Ozeki somehow manages to weave together multiple storylines, occurring in different locations and occupying different moments of time. At first, I was completely annoyed by Nao's diary entries. After reading the prologue, I thought I was going to hate the book and even contemplated abandoning it altogether. I'm glad I didn't because, aside from the prologue, Nao's diary was my favourite part of the novel. I was excited when the book returned to her sections (the story is broken up in sections about Nao and sections about Ruth) because I wanted to hear about her story. Like Ruth, I desperately wanted to catch up to the moment in time in which Nao was writing. The teenager writes about her extremely sad life in a way that conveys ignorance. However, her diary entries give away a lot more than she expects them to and, as the reader, you begin to understand her attitude towards the world.

---

"Her own name, Ruth, had often functioned like an omen, casting a complex shadow forward across her life. The word ruth is derived from the Middle English rue, meaning remorse or regret. Ruth's Japanese mother wasn't thinking of the English etymology when she chose the name, nor did she intend to curse her daughter with it--Ruth was simply the name of an old family friend. But even so, Ruth often felt oppressed by the sense of of her name, and not just in English. In Japanese, the name was equally problematic. Japanese people can't pronounce 't' or 'th.' In Japanse, Ruth is a paradoxical name, pronounced either rutsu, meaning 'roots,' or rusu, meaning "not at home" or 'absent.'"