A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)
A Tale for the Time Being is the story of two people who live oceans and years apart and yet are indelibly linked together. Nao is Naoko Yasutani. She is a sixteen year old Japanese girl who lives in Japan. She calls herself a “time being” and explains that 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 will ever be.”
Ruth is a married woman living in a small town on Vancouver Island in the province of British Columbia, Canada who will discover something that belongs to Nao and it will forever change her life. Ruth was beachcombing when she discovered a barnacle encrusted freezer bag. Believing it to be garbage, she takes it home to throw it out with the trash later. Having forgotten that she left the bag out on the porch of the front steps to the house, her husband, Oliver, picks it up and asks what it is. Ruth says it’s just garbage but before she can tell her husband not to bring it in the house, it was too late. He not only brings it into the house but opens the bag to discover a Hello Kitty lunchbox. In the box were more plastic bags and inside the bags they found a stack of letters, a book with a French title, and a wristwatch.
Ruth and Oliver are book lovers. Ruth is a novelist and Oliver believes that all novelists should have cats and books. The title on the book from the Hello Kitty box said “A la recherche du temps perdu par Marcel Proust”. “In Search of Lost Time”. However, when Ruth opens the book, what greets her eyes are handwritten pages in purple ink and by the looks of the writing, she surmises that it was written by a young girl.
Ruth and Oliver also discover that the stack of letters were written in Japanese and they imagine that the items were thrown overboard from a cruise ship. A friend of theirs says it may have drifted from one of the Pacific Ocean’s gyres, a collection of ocean currents that circulates around Japan and the West Coast. Their friend said that experts had predicted debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan would eventually wash up on the shores of Vancouver Island.
The book with the Proust cover turned out to be a diary written by Nao. Ruth wasn’t sure if she should read it or not but curiosity gets the best of her and what she reads disturbs her. On the first page after Nao introduces herself and wonders who will read this book, but then writes “Actually, it doesn’t matter very much, because by the time you read this, everything will be different.” Nao continues to tell the reader that this is her diary of her last days on earth, implying that she intends to commit suicide after completing it.
As Ruth continues reading the diary, she becomes obsessed with finding out more about Nao. After reading the first few pages, Ruth feels an urgency to either help the girl or save her, even though she realizes both actions are not logical. The more she learns about Nao’s life, the deeper she tries to find out exactly who Naoko Yasutani is. Nao’s diary is full of reasons why she wants to say good-bye to the world - being bullied at school, her father getting fired from his job in the U.S., her mother who she believes is more concerned about appearances than about her own daughter.
There is still the mystery of the letters written in Japanese that appear to be older than the Proust diary book and there is also the question of the antique watch. Does Ruth believe she can help Nao in any way? Does Nao carry out her plan to end her life? Finally, do they ever meet or are they just two “time beings” that have yet to cross paths? ~Ernie Hoyt