2019/64: A Tale for the Time Being -- Ruth Ozeki

"I've always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide," she said. "That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it." [p. 314]

Some time after the Japanese tsunami, a Japanese-American writer named Ruth is walking along the beach near her home in British Columbia when she discovers a plastic-wrapped Hello Kitty lunchbox containing a diary (disguised as À la recherche du temps perdu, an inscribed watch, and some old letters. The diary belonged to 16-year-old Nao (pronounced 'now'), who grew up in America but had to return to Japan with her family when the dot-com bubble burst. Nao is bullied mercilessly by her schoolmates (who even stage a funeral for her, and afterwards behave as though she is never present); her father is smothered by depression.

Ruth is a writer whose current book is stalled: she is fascinated by Nao's autobiography, and her intention of writing the biography of her great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko, who is 105 years old and a Buddhist nun. Jiko's beliefs infuse Nao's narrative: a time being, for instance, is 'someone who lives in time', and Nao spends a lot of her time considering time, wasting it, 'what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It's not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands' [p. 22]. Ruth can't be sure whether Nao was a victim of the tsunami, or whether she had already died -- perhaps by her own hand -- before it happened. She Googles Nao, and the humiliating video of her which apparently went viral: nothing. Did Nao ever really exist? And weren't there more pages, once, in her diary?

This is a complex and multilayered novel: about the tensions between Nao's American upbringing and her Japanese life, about her father's refusal to compromise his beliefs, about her great-grandmother's philosophy and about Jiko's son, Nao's grandfather, and his life as a scholar and then as a kamikaze pilot. Nao's first-person narrative, with its idioms and insights into Japanese pop culture, contrasts sharply with Ruth's third-person narrative. (Is Ruth the character the same person as Ruth Ozeki, author of this book?) Ruth sees Nao's story through a lens fogged by her own experiences: her mother's Alzheimers-related decline, her own difficulties with her writing, her isolation in British Columbia and the frequent, not always welcome attempts of her husband Oliver to explain Science to her. (They have a cat. It is named Schrodinger but mostly called Pest or Pesto. I don't think Ruth appreciates the cat as much as she should.)

A Tale for the Time Being takes in 9/11, the Pacific Gyre, quantum mechanics and the philosophical implications of the reader/writer relationship. It's beautifully written, powerfully affecting -- and probably a book not to be rushed through while one's stressed and unhappy. I think I'd like to read it again when life is more peaceful.

Read for rubric 'a religion other than your own' of the Reading Women 2019 challenge.