“Beautifully written, intensely readable, and richly layered . . . When Nao learns to meditate at Jiko’s temple she says, ‘When you return your mind to zazen, it feels like coming home.’ Ultimately this satisfying novel is about discovering home in the moment, or now, and also home within ourselves.”
A Tale for the Time Being explores many themes, biculturalism, war, manga, depression, suicide clubs, Internet bullying, the slippery qualities of time, and Zen Buddhism. The writing resonates with an immediacy and rawness that is believable and touching.” “A fascinating multigenerational tapestry of long ago, recent past, and present . . . Ozeki revels in Tokyo teen culture-this goes far beyond Hello Kitty-and explores quantum physics, military applications of computer video games, Internet bullying, and Marcel Proust, all while creating a vulnerable and unique voice for the sixteen-year-old girl at its center.” “A terrific novel full of breakthroughs both personal and literary . . . all drawn into the stories of two ‘time beings,’ Ruth and Nao, whose own fates are inextricably bound.” Many of the elements of Nao’s story-schoolgirl bullying, unemployed suicidal ‘salarymen,’ kamikaze pilots-are among a Western reader’s most familiar images of Japan, but in Nao’s telling, refracted through Ruth’s musings, they become fresh and immediate, occasionally searingly painful. “A delightful yet sometimes harrowing novel . . . “Plunges us into a tantalizing narration that brandishes mysteries to be solved and ideas to be explored.”
Dualities, overlaps, time shifts, and coincidences are the currents that move A Tale for the Time Being along: This is a book that does not give up its multiple meanings easily, gently but insistently instructing the reader to progress slowly in order to contemplate the porous membrane that separates fact from fiction, self from circumstance, past from present.” “Nao’s lively voice, by turns breezy, petulant, funny, sad, and teenage-girl wise, reaches the reader in the pages of her diary, which, as Ruth Ozeki begins to fold and pleat her intricate parable of a novel, washes ashore, safe in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, on a small Canadian island off the coast of British Columbia. . . .
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