by Ruth Ozeki (also narrator)
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Published: 2013
Publisher: Penguin Books
Genre: Historical, Contemporary, Magical Realism, Japan
Paperback: 432
Rating: 5
Zombie sighting:
Ruth scanned the beach. The scavengers looked possessed, like zombies, the walking dead.
Part 2, Ruth, page 152
First sentence(s):
Hi!
My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.
“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
PeekAbook:
My two-bits:
Whoa! this book gets into a lot issues including death, bullying, suicide, WWII, tsunami, 911, past and present. Loved how it all came together and tied into each other.
Also learned some of the modern day Japanese culture in regards to what parents and kids go through upon returning to Japan after living in the U.S.
* Listened to audiobook version.
* part of World Reads challenge - Japan (here)
