A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki

Just before Christmas, I finished A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki (a Zen Buddhist priest, writer and filmmaker). The POV characters in the novel are Ruth (is the novel semi-autobiographical?) — a Japanese-American author who lives with her husband in retirement on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia — and Nao Yasutani, a sixteen year old girl who spent her young formative years in California; but, for economic reasons, her family moved back to Japan.

Ruth finds a waterproofed package on a beach, and the package contains Nao’s diary and other artifacts that pertain to Nao’s tale. The novel unfolds with alternate sections; Ruth’s portions are presented in a third-person narrative, while Nao’s sections are her journal as translated by Ruth, presented in a first-person narrative. Nao’s name is pronounced Now, and time is a crucial theme (Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is mentioned several times).

Death is a significant theme, as is suicide, war, bullying (in all its forms: intimidation, harassment, oppression, torment, ganging-up, etcetera), diversity, Alzheimer’s, anthropology, philosophy, origami, Buddhism, the relationship between author and reader, and several others…

The time being (from the Japanese, uji, translated from The Time-Being, by Eihei Dogen) refers to an eternally present moment, and also indicates a being that lives within time; hence, the time being must someday perish. I don’t want to say anything more about the book, but it was a wonderful voyage.

I was trapped, as a time being, for several weeks between its pages. But that was in the past…

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?” [A Tale for the Time Being, p. 95]

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