From Goodreads
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 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.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow! This is a set text for my course next semester and it really has had a significant impact. It challenges the whole notion of writer and reader and surprises in a philosophical manner ever few chapters. I can see I will need to read over a few times. It is a narrative that needs a lot of thought having many, many layers.
I did not give it 5 stars as I felt as a novel it didn’t pick me up and drive me onto the next page (but then I have been reading SciFi for oh so many years – Peter Hamilton sagas)!
There are many surprises and twists the leave you bewildered and seeking more understanding – “up or down – same thing”.
If you have spent any time in Japan you will smile and cry as you come to understand a little more of that complex culture.