As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.įull of Ozeki's signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox-possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. In this essay, I investigate this fundamental epistemological question about reading Asian American literary texts by examining Ruth Ozekis. Ozeki, an award-winning author and a Zen Buddhist priest, considers how writing and mortality intertwine in A Tale for the Time Being. A diary is Nao's only solace-and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. It’s quite experimental in form, partly a work of historical fiction and partly a lightly fictionalized memoir.

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. 'A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.' A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptinessįinalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award A Tale for the Time Being A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.

A tale for the time being author