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A Tale for the Time Being Reading Order
Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013) is the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel in which a writer named Ruth, living on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, finds a diary in a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the beach — apparently written by Nao, a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl in Tokyo contemplating suicide — and becomes obsessed with Nao's fate. A novel of nested texts (Ruth's present, Nao's diary, letters from Nao's great-uncle Haruki, a Zen monk, and a WWII kamikaze pilot), it is a meditation on time, consciousness, Buddhist philosophy, and the relationship between a writer and the person she reads.
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A Tale for the Time Being
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A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki·2013·Stand-alone — no prior Ruth Ozeki required. Her other novels include My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003).
A Tale for the Time Being — Frequently Asked Questions
What is A Tale for the Time Being about?
A Tale for the Time Being alternates between two narratives: Ruth, a novelist living on a remote British Columbia island, finding and reading a diary in a Hello Kitty lunchbox that washed up on the beach, possibly debris from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami; and the diary itself, written by Nao, a sixteen-year-old girl in Tokyo who is being bullied at school, contemplating suicide, and visiting her great-grandmother Jiko, a hundred-and-four-year-old Buddhist nun. The novel interweaves Nao's story with letters from her great-uncle Haruki, a WWII kamikaze pilot, and is in part about the relationship between the reader and the person she reads.
What does 'time being' mean in A Tale for the Time Being?
The title comes from a translation of the Japanese Buddhist concept of 'uji' (being-time) as articulated by the thirteenth-century Zen master Dōgen Zenji — the idea that all beings are time, that the present moment is time itself. Nao, who is studying with her great-grandmother Jiko at a Zen temple, is drawn to this concept as she struggles with the question of whether to kill herself: if she is a 'time being,' she exists only in the present moment, which changes the stakes of both living and dying. The novel uses Buddhist philosophy throughout to think about time, impermanence, and the relationship between past and future selves.
Is A Tale for the Time Being based on a true story?
A Tale for the Time Being is a work of fiction, though it draws on real events (the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the tradition of Zen practice at Japanese Buddhist temples) and on Ozeki's own experience as a half-Japanese, half-American novelist and Zen Buddhist priest. The character of Ruth, the novelist on the British Columbia island, is autobiographically close to Ozeki herself; the character of Nao is invented. Ozeki has spoken about how the real debris from the tsunami that reached North American shores prompted the novel.
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