Tale For The Time Being Book Review 

A Tale For The Time Being Book Review 

by Kai Leo 

A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is a poignant exploration of loss, love, war, time, identity, and much more. Ruth Ozeki is an American author and filmmaker. Her popular books include A Tale for the Time Being, All Over Creation, Timecode of a Face, and The Book of Form and Emptiness. Her movies are Halving the Bones (1996) and Body of Correspondence (1994). Many of her stories are based on real-life experiences and the Japanese voice. 

A woman named Ruth and her husband, Oliver, move into the small coastal town. While walking along the beach, Ruth finds a metal Hello Kitty lunchbox. In the box is a diary of a young Japanese girl named Nao. Ruth suspects this to be debris from the 2011 tsunamis in Japan. She decides to read this diary and learns more about this mysterious girl. Ruth, throughout the book, feels lost and, to fix that feeling, draws a connection between her and Nao. She is described to be an author but feels suffocated by this small town. It is a constant moving force for her in the story to find out the fate of this missing girl, but she fails to focus on her own life and relations. 

As we learn more, we realize how lonely Nao is. She grew up in Sunnyvale, California, for most of her life and moved to Japan because of her father's financial troubles. She is constantly bullied by her classmates and is struggling with her identity. A big part of her identity is her great-grandmother, Jiko. Jiko is a 104 feminist Buddhist nun. One summer, she spends the summer with Jiko at her temple and discovers herself. One of my favorite quotes from her is “I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. 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.”

 This was a stunning tale, and it made me cry. I personally find it a must-read because, although our two main characters haven't even met, they can connect and relate so deeply. It does deal with dark subjects such as suicide, sexual assault, and extreme bullying. If you don't mind these topics as a reader, I think you will be quite surprised and delighted by this book.