Book Review: 'A Tale For The Time Being'

Book: A Tale For The Time Being
Author: Ruth Ozeki
Publisher: Canongate
Pages: 401
Price: Rs399

What do you call a coming-of-age story that incorporates everything from world wars to tsunamis, attempted suicides and marital skirmish, even as it takes up Zen Buddhist positions and debates quantum physics? Vexing and intriguing in equal parts Ruth Ozeki’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel does all this and more. There are puns, and perhaps too many self-references, yet the emotional centre of A Tale For The Time Being rests with its sixteen-year-old heroine Nao. Her name itself (pronounced “Now”) is a pun, and one of the book’s themes is the slippery nature of the present moment.

Nao Yasutani is uprooted from Sunnyvale, California to Tokyo where she faces vicious school bullying building up to a mock funeral arranged for “Transfer Student Yasutani,” and even a near-rape in the girls’ toilet. While her father struggles with unemployment and botched suicide attempts, her mother is emotionally and physically unavailable, either because she is staring at jellyfish in the aquarium or working long hours in publishing. Nao realises she is a kind of living ghost, or “ikisudama,” of no agency in this world. However, there is the positive legacy of her 104-year old great-grandmother who is a Zen monk. This compels Nao to create a diary, and in another bit of self-referential irony, she finds a blank diary titled with Marcel Proust’s famous pseudo-autobiographical novel À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (In Search Of Lost Time).

Nao’s diary, a watch, and some letters all packed in a freezer bag and a Hello Kitty lunchbox wash up on an island poignantly called Desolation Sound. Ruth, a self-exiled New Yorker finds the freezer bag. Her naturalist husband assumes the package from Japan is jetsam carried forth by “Drifters… Escaping the orbit of the Pacific Gyre.” This package may carry the weight of tragedy if it turns out to be one of those things that the tsunami swept out into the sea when it hit Japan.

Between Internet cut-outs and coyote attacks on the time-lagged island, Ruth finds herself drawn further and further into Nao’s reality. Ruth struggles with the sensation that Nao must be saved from disaster. Except, can one be saved from events already a decade old?

Ozeki binds together the threads she has planted through the story, so that Zen philosophy, an immigrant crow that may have mystical powers, and the quirky bends of quantum physics, make a formidable argument where time, agency, and geography may bend thus allowing Ruth and Nao’s life to become “entangled.” A self-proclaimed “time being”, or being trapped in time, Nao is a heroine worth following and her anxieties morph into a kind of universal existential angst. It can take some work on the reader’s part to keep up with all the metaphysics, footnotes and appendixes involved but it is rewarding to be carried away with the currents that Ozeki constructs in A Tale For The Time Being.