Amidst the endless sea of cliched young adult novels, "A Tale for the Time Being" by Ruth Ozeki is a rare gem of a book. Funny at times, devastating at others and thought-provoking all throughout, it is one that completely breaks the mould of young adult literature.
The book starts off as the diary of a teenager girl named Nao in modern day Tokyo. She writes with the frankness and attention span of a teenager, skipping from asking questions of the reader to describing her day, interjecting with the occasional “Are you still there?”. However, Nao’s diary is different from your standard teenage girl’s diary in the way that she is acutely aware that she is writing to someone. She states that the main objective of her diary is to relay the story of her great-grandmother, Yasutani Jiko and in the beginning, it may seem that she is successful in that regard. However slowly, we start to see Nao stray from the path of Jiko’s story and we dive deeper into the joy and pain of Nao’s own life. Reading each chapter of Nao’s diary was like peeling back the layers of an onion, complete with the crying effect that onions seem to have. Each story that she recounted had the pureness and candidness of a girl my age and by the end of the book, I genuinely felt like she was my friend.
This book though has much more going on within it than the diary of a young girl. It also illustrates the story of a woman named Ruth in British Columbia who finds Nao’s diary washed up on shore. We read Nao’s diary along with her while at the same time, learning about Ruth’s own life as well. Ruth lives in a quiet town in British Columbia almost untouched by modern technologies but her mundane life is turned upside down when she find’s Nao’s diary. She is slowly drawn into Nao’s story more and more and throughout the book seeks to find concrete evidence that this young girl whose diary that she is reading really exists. The addition of this additional voice in the book is the perfect companion to the starkness of Nao’s story. With Ruth, the book turns even more realistic and it brings it out of the pages. She is motherly and concerned. She is one of us, worried about Nao, wanting to read her whole story in a sitting yet knowing that doing so will make us lose her faster.
Much of the book is founded on contrast: contrasting cultures, beliefs, or lives but instead of teaching us that like oil and water, two things will never be able to fully integrate, it teaches us there is grey in between black and white. We see this in how Nao and her old Jiko were able to connect despite their obvious differences or how Ruth’s urban life has somehow found itself on a small island. Ruth Ozeki’s talent for contrast is probably one of the greatest triumphs of this book. She has the ability to switch her voice flawlessly from an adolescent girl to a grown woman while retaining the dignity of both. She relays Nao’s life story with such an appropriate voice that I found myself smiling along with her and crying along with her as well. Yet she shows Ruth as just how I imagined her to be, mature and caring if not a bit discontent with her life. At times, she shows the lives of these two ladies as completely different, literally and metaphorically on opposite sides of the world but at others, she shows their lives intertwining, maybe not physically, but on an emotional level. Ozeki has the ability to switch between serious themes to more light-hearted ones in the span of a few pages, yet it never seems tacked on or lacking in taste at all.
Of course, a book ambitious enough to take two stories and somehow combine them into one isn’t to be without its faults yet even its shortcomings didn’t really change my idea of it. Late in the book, it starts to forgo its previous realism for a taste of the supernatural and in my opinion, it didn’t really serve a purpose. It seemed like a last minute idea to make the story more interesting and honestly, it could have done without it.
"A Tale for the Time Being"" was a book that left me thinking about it long after finishing. Its themes of living in the moment while remembering the past, and the power of words are ones that anyone can relate to and by the end of the book, the stories shared in it will have grown so close to your heart that it is easy to think that Nao and Ruth were real people you knew. If I had to critique one part of this book, it is that it had to end. Immediately after finishing the book, my inner optimist wanted something more while my inner realist told me that it couldn’t have ended any other way. I applaud Ozeki for being able to take these two lives and knot them together, masterfully ending the story in what I thought was the best way possible, truly reflecting the unpredictability of life and the value of living in the now. Her command of language is the perfect balance of being accessible yet profound and because of this, I would rate this book a solid 4.5 stars. "A Tale for the Time Being"” is one of those rare books that I would honestly recommend to anyone because it takes a topic that we’re all familiar with: life and runs with it. This is a book that celebrates life, the mundanity of it and the trials and truly shows you the meaning of now.