I'm imagining that this really tough book in every way is autobiographical. That Ruth the writer in the book is Ruth the writer of the book with writer's block and has fictionalised breaking it. Certainly they both have a partner called Oliver.

Ruth a writer in British Columbia finds a diary written by a teenager in Japan and joins the two voices together across time and space. Ruth's reading of the diary allows her to reflect on her own writing and considers the role of the reader, an idea introduced at the very start of the book and rounded off at the end when Nao writes,

. . . if you decide not to read anymore, hey no problem because you're not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you do decide to read on, then guess what? You're my kind of time being and together we'll make magic.
p4

And isn't that what writers do? Create readers. Or, do readers create writers? Both happen in this book with Nao imagining a reader for her diary which reads like a long suicide note. Removed from America at very short notice when her father loses his job and all the money he has invested, they return to Japan where Nao has to enter school, is behind the Japanese pupils and is bullied mercilessly and violently. There are parts of this book that are very hard to read and this is one. One of the others is that Nao's father tries to commit suicide twice during the story and we feel the tension that she feels as she watches her father like a hawk, looking for clues that he is going to do it again.

Nao's Great Grandma, Jiko, is 104 years old and a Buddhist nun living in a monastery some miles away. Eventually, Nao goes to spend a summer with her to recover and learns that Jiko had a son who had to join the airforce and did so as a kamikaze pilot. Suicide is a theme of the book with his letters and diary recovered as part of the documents that Ruth finds.

There are books within books in this book (!) with Ruth working on a memoir of her mother's experience of Alzheimer's so this is one of the parallels between the stories where Nao and Ruth are writing about aging women. Not only are there books within books but hidden books such as the Kamikaze diary written in french to keep it secret from the censors who are very obvious and intrusive readers.

If this isn't enough in a book there is the tsunami and 9/11 both of which play a part in the story along with rubbish or as it is called in the book, garbage. The natural events of the tsunami and garbage gyre, an oceanic circling caused by wind or currents, has the garbage trapped but often garbage is mentioned as a start of something - in some cases, stories. For me, the whole book feels like a garbage gyre with so many ideas circling round and round, between the readers and writers.

I haven't even mentioned the themes of memories or time, slowing it down, speeding it up.

When she was writing a novel, living deep inside a faictional world, the days got jumbled together, and entire weeks or months or even years would yield to the ebb and flow of the dream. Bills went unpaid, emails unanswered, calls unreturned. Fiction had its own time and logic. That was its power.
p338

It's not just time and its speed but time across the centuries. After the tsunami in Japan stones were found on hillsides with messages saying 'Do not build your homes below this point!'

Some of the warning stones were more than six centuries old. A few had been shifted by the tsunami, but most remained safely out of its reach.

"They're the voices of our ancestors," said the mayor of a town destroyed by the wave. "They were speaking to us across time, but we didn't listen."
p122

Getting to the temple where Jiko lived was like traveling back in time about a thousand years. 'Zen Buddhists aren't big on modern conveniences.'

The writing is fantastic but there were times when I had to stop and reread a sentence,not having really understood it. I know what each of the words in the following sentence mean, but still struggle with their meaning altogether in this sentence. Here, Ruth is thinking about names.

The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in a liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.
p61

I think the liminal space is a very important idea in this book. Nao is in a liminal space, not Japanese, not American. When Ruth tries to meditate she finds herself in a 'darkened liminal state', the ghosts attending the ceremony at the monastery are definitely liminal as is the ceremony itself. But most of all, this book occupies the liminal space of a writer blocked and struggling to find a way out. ( )

This is a lovely novel, the latter half of which I read whilst recuperating from a sudden and unpleasant stomach bug. Being ill tends to make me more emotional than usual, so I found certain developments towards the end distinctly upsetting. Nonetheless, I made it through. The characters are the strength of this book, as they are particularly sensitively written and complex. Nao, her father, and her great-grandmother especially stand out. Oliver comes off as wikipedia in human form, although I have met people like that. The narrative is well-paced, involving, and includes a fascinating exploration of time and how we experience it. I was moved and distracted from feeling poorly, so four stars are definitely deserved. ( )

Japanese literature is pretty dark... it was hard to read this at first - too much suicide. It got better as it went on. ( )

It got a little boring when the letters were read (I listened to this book), but overall I was entranced! ( )

It took me more than two months to finish this. So deep and heart-wrenching in parts, I couldn't fly through it. Nao, the Japanese girl who is the main narrator of her own diary, is a character who will stay with me. I just felt at times that the author tried to do too much, and I could have stayed with Nao and her story more than Ruth's, the woman who finds her diary. The writing itself was magnificent. ( )