TW: Suicide, extreme bullying

A Tale for the Time Being tells two parallel stories: Ruth’s and Naoko’s (Nao). Nao lives in Tokyo, Japan while Ruth lives on Vancouver Island in Canada. Walking on the beach one day, Ruth finds a package which contains Nao’s diary, her great uncle Haruki’s letters from WWII, and his watch. In her diary, Nao shares about the key events and daily struggles in her frankly heartbreaking life. After her father loses his high-paying job in the Silicon Valley, the family moves to a shabby apartment in Tokyo populated largely by hostesses, a place unfit for raising a child. Her father falls into a severe depression and retreats into a hikikomori’s lifestyle, attempting suicide multiple times. Once, Nao is the one who discovers him. Her constant exposure to this usually taboo reality jades her to the horror of having a parent regularly trying to die. She comes to speak almost nonchalantly of it. At the same time, it is clear from the way a figurative grey fog clouds her perspective of life in her writing that her father’s struggles deeply affect her. To support the family, Nao’s mother becomes the sole breadwinner. Amidst it all, Nao appears to be completely neglected. She endures extreme physical, emotional and even sexual abuse from her classmates and teachers in school before dropping out to become an underaged prostitute. In the middle of all this, she spends a summer in the mountains with her Zen Buddhist great-grandmother Jiko, who offers her some refuge, albeit temporarily. Jiko seems to be the only adult who actually pays attention to Nao and shows her true compassion. She teaches Nao through different techniques, and by setting an example, how to find a semblance of peace and grace even in the most challenging moments.

The chapters in A Tale for the Time Being alternate between Nao and Ruth’s stories. Alongside Nao’s diary, we follow Ruth’s small town life on Vancouver Island after she relocates from New York City. In contrast to the bustle and anonymity of city life, Ruth has to adapt to a quiet existence with her husband and cat in a highly interconnected community. While this way of life has aspects that rub her the wrong way— the total lack of privacy for instance— it also proves helpful. For instance, Nao’s great uncle’s diary is written in French, and Ruth easily finds a friend who willingly helps her translate it. This friend, like many others, also rallied around Ruth’s family to help care for her ageing senile mother while she was still alive.

The key tenets in A Tale for the Time Being derive from Zen Buddhism— the concept of oneness, or nonduality— and sitting Zazen, or meditation. The former states that we are all one and the same and therefore interconnected, while the latter teaches that practicing meditation opens the door to inner peace and wisdom. Indeed, as Ruth reads about Nao’s life, her reality becomes increasingly intertwined with Nao and Jiko’s as she comes to care deeply for the girl. While Ruth’s life isn’t nearly as tumultuous as Nao’s she nevertheless also benefits from lessons she learns from reading the diary. She, like Nao, begins sitting Zazen. As time goes on, Ruth also appears to increasingly embrace the omnipresence of her community, living out the Zen concept of oneness and interdependence. Through her eyes, the people around her appear to change from pesky interlopers to a comforting and much-needed family of sorts. Furthermore, beyond just the structure of the novel which tells of two different lives becoming one, the author Ruth Ozeki also exemplifies non-duality in the way one of the main characters is named after her. Ruth is simultaneously author, reader and character.

A Tale for the Time Being further realises the idea of oneness through magic realist elements. The character Ruth has dreams in which she literally becomes Jiko, seeing through Jiko’s eyes. In her dreams, she loses the concept of being a singular person trapped in a physical body in a highly literal way. When she ‘catches up’ with Nao— reading the diary till the point in Nao’s life where Nao starts writing in the present tense, the diary temporarily ends. The pages following this part, which Ruth swears were previously filled with words, are now empty. This is a crucial moment in Nao’s life and Ruth manages to intervene through a dream to ensure a better ending for Nao and her family. She becomes both reader and co-author. Besides the diary, another way the two lives are physically connected is through a bird, a Jungle Crow. Jungle Crows are native to the Asian and Japanese region yet one appears in Ruth and her husband’s yard just as Ruth finds the diary. In time, the crow proves to be a sort of magical being that connects Nao and Ruth, acting almost as a guardian spirit for the both of them.

Ozeki offers embracing oneness and non-duality as an antidote to loneliness and disconnection. Naoko and her father live with much pain and fear. They clearly love each other deeply, but cannot express it in a way that both reaches the other person and assuages their individual loneliness. Ruth, too, is surrounded by people but has internal struggles no one else, including her own husband, can truly understand or reach. At the end of the novel, Jiko’s last wish for Nao and her father is to live: to not only stay alive, but also be alive and not just exist. They are both brought to this moment because of Ruth’s intervention, displaying the importance of interdependence and community. A Tale for the Time being is a both a novel and a meditation on the ways we exist amidst suffering. Recognising ourselves in others and vice versa leads to life, connection and progress.