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A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
4,3962512,610 (4.06)1 / 392
"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 ever will be." In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox--possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.… (more)
Recently added bysmhharp, ebredberg, Dgeorge03, private library, amckie, luisitocapotito, CarmenNetten, redmama68
  1. 21
    Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (bibliothequaire)
  2. 21
    To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey (pamelahuffman)
    pamelahuffman: In both books there are people in the present trying to make sense of journals and artifacts from the past. Loved both books.
  3. 00
    Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (susanbooks)
    susanbooks: Ozeki' s novel and Rizzuto's memoir are about daughters of Japanese mothers & American fathers who are trying to come to terms with world war 2 in the aftermath of 9/11. They're very different books, but both explore issues of mothering, memory, and loss.… (more)
  4. 03
    1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (urban_lenny)
    urban_lenny: Similar concepts of multiple worlds
  5. 15
    Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (tobiejonzarelli)
Asia (30)
To Read (130)
Canada (21)
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» See also 392 mentions

English (243)  Dutch (3)  Spanish (2)  Danish (1)  All languages (249)
Showing 1-5 of 243 (next | show all)
Family Values
  BooksInMirror | Feb 19, 2024 |
Review Old Jiko style: Book is good. Book is bad. Same thing.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I loved the writing style and the mystery between Nao, Ruth and the Hello Kitty lunchbox. I adored Old Jiko and her words of wisdom. I was mostly interested in the stores of Haruki #1 and Haruki #2

It lost me a little bit towards the end with the quantum physics stuff and the receding ending to the story but I suppose the whole point was to make you consider the possibility of different worlds. I'm not sure that I believe!

Many readers may struggle with the focus on suicide, bullying and the dark side of Nao's life, but for me those sections helped provide necessary depth to the overall story. Those sections also made this a slow read for me....at times I had to force myself to go back because the story was sad and difficult for me even though I wanted to know what happened to our characters.

Overall I think it is well worth reading.



( )
  hmonkeyreads | Jan 25, 2024 |
Loved this message-in-a-bottle book! Told in two voices across a span of years, hinting that time is nonlinear and characters live in the moment when they are read. The author is a Zen Buddhist priest addressing the concepts of time, the life-giving power of words, quantum mechanics, multiple universes, and life as seen thru the eyes of a Japanese teen. ( )
  jemisonreads | Jan 22, 2024 |
A lovely, difficult book that will stay with me for a long time.

A Tale for the Time Being is a "You must change your life" kind of book. It's about time, death, consciousness, causality, and making meaning. It's also quirky and metafictional, but is nevertheless an accessible read, with likable characters and fairly linear storytelling.

Nao is a charming but depressed Japanese teenager dealing with brutal bullies, a suicidal father, and the aftershocks of family trauma from the Second World War. Nao keeps a diary that mysteriously ends up in the hands of Ruth, a fictionalized version of the author, who tries to track down Nao and reconstruct her life and fate. The novel dips its toe into the realms of speculative and surrealist fiction as it explores this relationship between reader and diarist.

A Tale for the Time Being feels like a catalog of strategies for responding to the impermanence and suffering of life: from suicide to making art to mindless Internet surfing to planting trees to the meditation practice of Nao's larger-than-life Buddhist nun great-grandmother. It's a book that goes deep, and at times it is an uncomfortable read. The forthright depictions of bullying, suicide, war, natural disaster, and sex work are never gratuitous, but they are graphic. That said, A Tale for the Time Being is absolutely a novel about hope. After Nao's spiral into darkness, subsequent moments of joy and rebirth feel earned.

If I didn't give this book five stars, it's only because it felt a little too linear, despite the meta, timey-wimey storytelling conceit. I wanted just a bit more ambiguity and weirdness, especially near the end.

Overall an excellent, profound read, and one that will hopefully inspire me to spend some time on my zafu this winter (I have a zafu and zabuton lovingly made by hippies in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so I truly have no excuse). ( )
  raschneid | Dec 19, 2023 |
Have you ever had a book that seems to be calling to you from your nightstand or your book shelf? It sounds silly, but that is what this book has been doing to me. I would notice it there sometimes, and I would pick it up and look at it, and even open the pages, but I would put it back because I didn't think the time was right, or that I was in the right frame of mind to read it. Well I finally picked it up again, and this time decided to read it. It would turn out to be one of the last books that I would read this year, but it would be the best. I have read some fabulous books this year, so I don't say this lightly. Ruth Ozeki seemed to have written this book for me at this my time of life. It is a book that actually made me examine and reevaluate my life. It made me appreciate and be thankful for the life that i have had. It made me think about why things in the world have happened the way they have. When a barnacle-covered "Hello-Kitty" lunchbox washes up on shore on a remote island just off the coast of British Columbia, it changes Ruth's life. Ruth and her husband Oliver are living a survivalist lifestyle. Ruth is an author and Oliver a very talented botanist. When Ruth finds a diary in the lunchbox written in English by a young Japanese girl named Nao Yasutani, she does not realize how reading this diary will forever change her life, and change her thoughts about what has been and is still happening in the world. Reading Nao's story is heartbreaking, but it is also totally engaging. Ozeki does not spare her readers with coloured-over descriptions of horrific happenings. The descriptions are graphic and totally gripping, and they pull the reader in, kicking and screaming, to her fictional world. The book restored my faith in human nature, and made me realize that no matter how bad things may appear, faith, love, family and human compassion, can make things better, and change our beliefs and our opinions, and maybe even change the world a little too. This is a lot for one novel to accomplish, but this one does all of this, as well as tell a great story about a brave 16-year old Japanese girl. and a 30 something Canadian writer who meet through the pages of a diary. ( )
  Romonko | Dec 18, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 243 (next | show all)
In clever and deeply affecting ways, Ruth Ozeki’s luminous new novel explores notions of duality, causation, honour, and time. ... Though [the character] Ruth is clearly intended as a semi-autobiographical portrait of the author, it’s the character of Nao, in all her angsty adolescent dismissiveness, that Ozeki truly pulls off (here’s an author who should be writing YA novels).
 
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is expansive, provocative and sometimes rather confusing. But that’s okay. It’s supposed to be....It can leave you scratching your head – for starters, the main character of the novel seems to be Ruth Ozeki herself, or at least, a fairly obvious facsimile of her – but ultimately, the effect of such riddles is charming, earnest and very much a departure from your typical literary novel....Like them, Ozeki manages to turn existential conundrums into a playful, joyful and pleasantly mind-bending dialogue between reader and writer. Here’s hoping that this book will find its way to an audience just as excited to participate in it.
added by zhejw | editGlobe and Mail, Lucy Silag (Mar 29, 2013)
 
"A Tale for the Time Being"... is an exquisite novel: funny, tragic, hard-edged and ethereal at once.

[It's] heady stuff, but it hangs together for a couple of reasons — the exuberance of Ozeki's writing, the engaging nature of her characters and, not least, her scrupulous insistence that it doesn't have to hang together, that even as she ties up loose ends, others come unbound.
added by zhejw | editLos Angeles Times, David Ulin (Mar 21, 2013)
 
Seen from space, or from the vantage point of those conversant with Zen principles, A Tale for the Time Being is probably a deep and illuminating piece of work, with thoughtful things to say about the slipperiness of time. But for those positioned lower in the planet's stratosphere, Ozeki's novel often feels more like the great Pacific gyre it frequently evokes: a vast, churning basin of mental flotsam in which Schrödinger's cat, quantum mechanics, Japanese funeral rituals, crow species, fetish cafes, the anatomy of barnacles, 163 footnotes and six appendices all jostle for attention. It's an impressive amount of stuff.

One version of you might be intrigued. Another might pray it doesn't land on your shore.
added by zhejw | editThe Guardian, Liz Jensen (Mar 15, 2013)
 
If you’re a fan of the metaphysician Martin Heidegger, or the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, you will be pleased at the novel’s tip of the hat to their abstruse notions of time and sub-atomic space. There’s even an appendix to the novel explaining the “thought experiment” known to the world as “Schrödinger’s cat...But the novel suffers from a tinge of self satisfaction. It pits sensitive souls like the involuntary kamikaze pilot who loves French literature against brutal army officers, and it’s not a fair fight. The fight becomes Us — readers who derive spiritual sustenance from Marcel Proust, and appreciate “the value of kindness, of education, of independent thinking and liberal ideals” — versus Them, who are sheer brutes.
 

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Epigraph
Dedication
For Masako,
for now and forever
First words
Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.
Quotations
Information from the Dutch Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
Een oude boeddha zei eens:

In de tijd, staan op de hoogste bergtop,
In de tijd, afdalen naar de bodem van de diepste zee,
In de tijd, een duivel met drie koppen en acht armen,
In de tijd, een vijf meter hoge boeddha van goud,
In de tijd, een monniksstaf of de vliegenmepper van een meester,
In de tijd, een pilaar of een lantaarn,
In de tijd, Jan en alleman,
In de tijd, de hele aarde en de eindeloze hemel.

- Dõgen Zenji, Bestaan in de tijd'
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Blurbers
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Wikipedia in English (3)

"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 ever will be." In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox--possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

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Book description
Depui un bar à hotêsses de Tokyo , Nao raconte de histoires : la sienne , ado déracinée , martyrisée par es camarades ; celle de sa fascinante aïeule , nonne zen de cent quatre ans ; de son grand-oncle kamikaze , passionné de poésie ; de son père qui cherche sur le net la recette du suicide parfait . Des intants de vie qu'elle veut confier avant de disparaître . Ruth s'interroge : et si elle , romancière en mal d'inspiration , avait le pouvoir de réécrire le destin de Nao , Serait il possible alors d'unir le passé et le présent ? La terre et le ciel ?
Haiku summary
Schoolgirls, Buddhist nuns
tsunami brings quantum gifts
From Japan to here
(pickupsticks)

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Penguin Australia

An edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia.

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