A Tale for the Time Being | Books
The story is about Ruth, a writer who lives in a remote island in British Columbia, struggling with her next work. And Nao Yasutani, a deeply troubled 16-year-old girl living in Japan who finds solace in old Jiko, her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Zen Buddhist nun. Nao decides to keep a secret diary, where she writes about the life of old Jiko, her great-grandmother, before ending her life.
Though separated by ocean and time, Ruth and Nao’s fates become entangled when Ruth finds the diary washed up on the shore of their island, a few years after 2011.
I love how it blends in history – world war II, recent calamities in Japan, 9/11 – with philosophy, quantum mechanics, a bit of time travel, Zen, Japanese culture, and Time as we understand it – into this thoughtful narrative. All my favorite ingredients in one book. Thank you, Ruth Ozeki. I also love how it sort of comes to a full circle at the end. Maybe not a perfect, complete circle, but one that has gaps and crevices and frayed edges, leaving space for mystery, and not-knowing.
It tackles a lot of other themes, too. Themes you would not suspect seeing the cover of the book and reading what it was about. It presents the importance of empathy, compassion, of integrity, of trying to focus on your own story, and of trying our best to understand people and situations. Or if it comes to it, to be at peace with simply not knowing.
Not knowing is hard. But sometimes it’s OK. Like the author wrote, not knowing keeps all the possibilities open.
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“…He stopped reading The Great Minds of Western Philosophy completely, and spends all his time programming, which really is his superpower. I mean, there are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like superstrength and superspeed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people’s minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves just by being there.Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except that I thought you would like to know.”
– Nao