Ruth accepts this invitation and decides to read the diary at roughly the same rate at which the girl wrote it, reasoning that this will help Ruth to “more closely replicate Nao’s experience.” And Ozeki’s novel seems to invite us to be in time with Ruth as Ruth is in time with Nao. At the end of Nao’s first diary entry, the girl invites her imagined reader to count the moments with her, really, to be in time with her. It is trying to make some real solid thing from the flow of life that is always changing.īut Ozeki prioritizes the novel’s thematic explorations at the expense of its other potential pleasures. Suicide stops life in time, so we can grasp what shape it is and feel it is real, at least for just a moment. We have thus far seen them only from a distance, so it’s thrilling, for example, to read Nao’s father’s thoughts on suicide: When her father and great-uncle chew over those same ideas, they do so in essays and letters that offer rare windows into their perspectives. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something.īecause Nao is sixteen and so often so likeable, I felt a good deal of sympathy, if occasional impatience, watching her think through the novel’s big ideas. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t. In the time it takes to say now, now is already over. At the same time, she seems to believe that “now” is an impossibility: Nao seeks to live in the “now.” As she recounts her past, she wonders not only who will read her story, but also when she will catch up to her present and what catching up will feel like. They talk and write and think about how they are experiencing time, about what it means to write the story of your life or to commit suicide. In both the Nao and Ruth portions of the novel, characters grapple with the book’s themes explicitly. And big questions propel Nao’s narrative: Will her father succeed in his next suicide attempt? Will Nao attempt suicide, too? She is the novel’s most nuanced and fully imagined character, at once recognizably adolescent and highly specific: observant and funny, angry and occasionally violent. Ruth’s compulsion to study Nao and her fascination with the young woman’s life will not be mysteries to the reader Nao is easy to root for even when we know she’s misinterpreting or behaving badly. Similarly, Ruth really ought to return to her long languishing memoir, but instead she spends her time researching Nao and her family. At the start of the novel, Nao promises to tell the story of her hundred-and-four-year-old great-grandmother Old Jiko, but instead she recounts her own story, her family’s move from Sunnyvale, California, back to Japan, the bullying she suffers at her new school, her father’s suicide attempts, and the evolution of her own suicidal thoughts. Though Ozeki has rather evenly divided the narrative space of the novel between Nao and Ruth, the book’s center of gravity is unquestionably Nao (pronounced “now”). As the novel alternates between excerpts of Nao’s diary and third-person point of view sections in which Ruth reacts to the diary and the other documents, A Tale proves an ambitious, if ultimately frustrating, meditation on suicide, the reader-writer relationship, and the human experience of time. The lunchbox contains a watch, a French composition book, a set of letters in Japanese, and, most intriguingly, the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl, Nao Yasutani. Early in Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, A Tale for the Time Being (Viking), a writer with whom Ozeki shares her first name finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox on the beach of her Pacific-Northwest island.
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