Nao (pronounced 'now') is a 16 year old schoolgirl in Japan. Which may indeed be part of Ozeki’s point - interconnectedness with other lives, other times, in fiction and in fact, can enrich our own experience. It takes her a fair while to resolve all this, and I confess I lost patience with Ruth and her fellow islanders halfway through, wanting to return to the Japanese characters in the story, who are far more interesting. Ozeki plays with the concept of the 'time being”, which seems to mean both a person existing in the here and now, and also the idea of time being fluid and mutable. This proves to be a whole lot more difficult than she expects, with none of the people or events described seeming to be traceable. Ruth feels a strong bond to Nao as she reads her story and obsesses with finding her to see if she is OK. The diary somehow ends up wrapped in a Hello Kitty bag with a WW2 watch and some letters, washed up on the shores of an island off British Columbia, where it is found by the struggling novelist Ruth. She records her story in a diary hidden inside a copy of Proust. She is bullied unmercifully, but her suicidal father and disengaged mother are unable to help. Ozeki’s novel concerns the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl called Nao (pun on “now”) who has returned to Japan from the USA.

A Tale for the Time Being somehow manages to blend zen philosophy, quantum mechanics, ecology, suicide, and teenage angst into a very readable story.

Ruth author a tale for the time being