by Ruth Ozeki ★★☆☆☆
Welcome to A Tale for the Time Being, or as it may alternatively be known, “the most depressing book I don’t recommend you read this year”. There are two narrators for this novel: Nao -- a Japanese girl who primarily spent her life in the United States until her father lost his job and her family moved back to Tokyo when she was in middle school -- and Ruth, a struggling author who found Nao’s diary washed ashore in British Columbia and is now trying to discover who she is. The novel bounces between the points of view, with Nao’s sections expressed as her diary entries (that Ruth is reading) and Ruth's as the steps she takes to learn more about Nao and the people she mentions. Nao's story takes place in the early 2000s; Ruth’s takes place more than 10 years later, a few years after the 2011 tsunami, which Ruth surmises carried the lunchbox across the Pacific.
The premise of the book was compelling, and I was excited to read it. Author Ozeki does a fine job of capturing the voice of Nao, who's about 15 at the time she's creating her diary. In fact, I'd say she does too good of a job of capturing the voice of a teenage girl. Nao rambles as part of her own one-sided conversation, stringing together run-on sentence after run-on sentence. I'll give you an example:
"Maybe in the next few minutes, he will lean awkwardly in my direction and say something surprisingly beautiful to me, and I will be overcome with fondness for him in spite of his greasy hair and bad complexion, and I'll actually condescend to converse with him a little bit, and eventually he will invite me to go shopping, and if he can convince me that he's madly in love with me, I'll go to a department store with him and let him buy me a cute cardigan sweater or keitai or handbag, even though he obviously doesn't have a lot of money. Then after, maybe we'll go to a club and drink some cocktails, and zip into a love hotel with a big Jacuzzi, and after we bathe, just as I begin to feel comfortable with him, suddenly his true inner nature will emerge, and he'll tie me up and put the plastic shop[ping bag from my new cardigan over my head and rape me, and hours later the police will find my lifeless naked body bent at odd angles on the floor, next to the big round zebra-skin bed."
(Ozeki 4)
If the speech pattern and style is a turn off above, you won't want to power through the 456 pages of this tome. If content like rape, suicide, underage sex, and bullying don't sound like your cup of tea, you definitely won't want to invest the time in this either.
When presented the right way, a really challenging and often depressing read can still be a powerful and fantastic book. Look no further than my #7 book of 2022, Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley, a tough read with several of the same challenging themes. What worked for me with Nightcrawling was that I was able to truly connect with the characters in the novel. But for whatever reason, that connection was especially difficult to make for me with A Tale for the Time Being, and as a result this one became a true chore and challenge to get through.
The novel does take an interesting turn in the final quarter, and some things like "why can't Ruth find anything on the internet about the people mentioned in the diary" is potentially explained. At the same time, a novel that is mostly rooted in reality takes a turn for the fantastical, which just felt like an odd choice. Without giving anything away, imagine the scene in The Neverending Story where Bastian can influence the outcome of the story by shouting into the wind. There just might be a scenario reminiscent of that.
Overall, though, I would not recommend this one.