Prescript: I have decided to write reviews of books I read from now on, be as short as they may. Literary analysis isn't my stronghold, and it's harder to explicate what I don't like than what is pleasant about a work, but maybe giving my crude thoughts a more concrete form will help.

Review: I wanted it to be better than it really is, and it was pacing along splendidly well for the first 2 parts. The ending felt paced; and all that QM-Buddhist charade is frankly getting old by now. How many novels do we have to endure where the author, instead of carrying out a subtle and fulfilling denouement, relied on a faulty understanding of QM to resolve the plot? That pissed me off more than anything.

Other than that, the plot paces nicely for a large part, and the prose isn't bad either.

I think it's imperative to read Proust and Dēngo now. ( )

Borrowed this from a friend back in March - it was an interesting read overall, but at times felt like a tourist's version of experiencing Japan. Half of the book is about Nao, who calls herself the "time being", a teenage girl who grew up in America, down on her luck in Japan and having to make money in the seedier parts of Akihabara - and the other half is about Ruth, a very literal author insert. Those parts felt like Ozeki wanted to write a memoir about her time living in British Columbia, but wasn't sure how to do it without fictionalizing it. That kind of thing doesn't always work, but I went with it, and I found it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction at times.

Through the conceit that Ruth finds Nao's diary washed up ashore and that the book is her reading them along with us, the story of both unfolds gradually. Perhaps too slowly for my liking. One annoying aspect was that Nao's chapters were written in her voice so much that they are liberally peppered with Japanese words, with footnotes to translate them into English (as if Ruth is presenting the words as-is and translating them for us) - very little was unfamiliar to me of course, and this is the part that made it feel like the tourist's version of Japan. Bilingual books are hard to do well.

There's also stuff about Zen Buddhism, and the book indulges in a bit of magical realism and time travel trickery towards the end. A good read overall, but I took a wee while to finish it off. ( )

A time being - one who lives within the bounds of time.
What a ride, this slowly sweeps you in and moves you through the lives of two people, a young girl and a woman reading the girl's diary that was swept out to sea. There are so many serious topics involved here, suicide, bullying, sexual assault, that it does get pretty heavy. The writing is fantastic though, very clever, funny, and pleasant. I loved this, and will look for more by this author. ( )

Basically a two timeline book with a teenage journal writer in 2001 Tokyo and her reader on a remote western Canadian island. Both are removed from places they thrived in and having difficulty moving ahead. The book takes a long time to really get going but somewhere about 2/3 of the way through it gets strangely and wonderfully entangling. ( )

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

Ozeki’s novel concerns the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl called Nao (pun on “now”) who has returned to Japan from the USA. She is bullied unmercifully, but her suicidal father and disengaged mother are unable to help. She records her story in a diary hidden inside a copy of Proust. 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.

Ruth feels a strong bond to Nao as she reads her story and obsesses with finding her to see if she is OK. This proves to be a whole lot more difficult than she expects, with none of the people or events described seeming to be traceable.

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. 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. 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. ( )