![]() ![]() When the dot-com bust sent them back to Tokyo, she found herself an outcast in junior high. We learn from the diary that Nao spent her childhood in California, where her father was a computer programmer. Ruth is more concerned with Nao’s implicit suicide threat. Perhaps, he thinks, it’s part of the debris flow from the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Ruth’s husband, Oliver, is excited by the idea that this package floated from Tokyo all the way to where they live, on an island off British Columbia. We soon learn that an American novelist named Ruth has found Nao’s diary on the beach in a plastic-wrapped Hello Kitty lunchbox that also contains a batch of old letters. happens to be the diary of my last days on earth.” ![]() “A time being is someone who lives in time.” But Nao plans “to drop out of time. . . “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being,” writes a funny, unhappy 16-year-old girl. From the first page of “ A Tale for the Time Being,” Ozeki plunges us into a tantalizing narration that brandishes mysteries to be solved and ideas to be explored. As contemporary as a Japanese teenager’s slang but as ageless as a Zen koan, Ruth Ozeki’s new novel combines great storytelling with a probing investigation into the purpose of existence. ![]()
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