A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being unfolds in two intertwined narratives. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao Yasutani is bullied at school and estranged from her depressed father after her family's move back to Japan from Silicon Valley. Planning to end her life, she instead begins a diary about her 104-year-old great-grandmother Jiko, a Buddhist nun, and her great-uncle Haruki, a reluctant kamikaze pilot conscripted during the Second World War.

On Cortes Island, a remote island off British Columbia, a novelist named Ruth finds Nao's diary washed ashore in a barnacle-encrusted Hello Kitty lunchbox, likely debris from the 2011 tsunami. As she reads, Ruth becomes consumed with tracking down what happened to Nao, drawing her own life -- and that of her husband, Oliver -- into Nao's story.

Ruth Ozeki's novel moves between the two women's voices to explore Zen Buddhism, the physics of time, and the fragile, connective act of reading and writing across distance. It won the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Kitschies' Red Tentacle award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.