The story itself is both heart-wrenching and uplifting, with Nao delving into her past to find out more about her Zen Buddhist nun grandmother’s life and Ruth going along for the ride. Both women are just trying to survive in a world that is drowning them and, through the words written in a diary, they find each other. The book narratives alternate between the two women, and as the story progresses we learn about Nao’s life in Japan as a bullied teenager with a precarious home situation and Ruth’s solitary existence with her husband in a tiny seaside town. Years later, Ruth, an author in Canada, finds the diary and can’t stop wondering whether Nao followed through with her plans. Nao, a teenager living in Japan who wants to kill herself, wrote a diary. On the novel side, this is a story about two women who are oceans apart.
This is likely because the author is a Zen Buddhist nun, so she’s dedicating her life to these questions, but the way she manages to weave them into the story itself is incredible. On the one hand, it’s a novel, but on the other it’s a philosophical discussion about life, time, and what’s real in this world. You know how sometimes you read a book and it raises so many philosophical questions that you know you’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come? Well, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is one of those books.
A Tale for the Time Being on March 12, 2013īuy the book: Amazon/Audible (this post includes affiliate links)
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