I almost gave up on this book after the first few pages. The main character’s voice was gratingly irritating. The themes the book promised to explore seemed like pale imitations of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler — that is, meditations on the acts of reading and writing and the relationships that form between reader and writer. Looking back, I had a good read on the book. It was both those things. There was a little more than that, but not much more.
One of our two main characters is a Japanese girl named Nao. Her diary pages make up about half the novel, and it was this prose that I found so irritating. The author deftly captured the odd mixture of childishness and worldliness of a lonely teenage girl. Our other main character, Ruth, is a middle aged woman living on a remote island in British Columbia, who finds Nao's diary. Her chapters act as a foil: her small everyday activities like walking to the post office are a respite from the excruciatingly severe bullying, familial trauma and sexual exploitation Nao experiences. Ruth’s interpretation of the diary is also a device that allows the author to discuss emotional insights that Nao was too immature to write about. (This is a drawback of the teenage diary device. Another approach is the one used in David Copperfield, where the protagonist recounts his childhood and youth from a close first-person perspective but with the hindsight granted by old age.)
There were many touching moments in the story. Nao’s realization that she was using the diary as an imaginary friend in her intense loneliness and search for escape, for example, was well done. Ruth's marriage with her husband was also sweet, and rare in fiction if not in life: their quiet mutual support, their familiarity (and occasional grumbling) with each other's quirks that can only be collected over many years together, their squabbles and reconciliations. I enjoyed much of Grandmother Jiko's mentorship of Nao: “surfer, wave, same thing.” (“A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean. A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”)
But overall, I thought the book attempted to do too much, and ended up rather less than the sum of its parts. The event that determines the outcome of the climax involves Ruth time-travelling during her dreams. In a book like If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, where surrealism and magical realism infuse every page, such a climax might serve to further develop themes of the translucency of the barrier between reader and writer. However, A Tale for the Time Being — for all the extreme sexual violence and emotional torture Nao suffers through — is otherwise realistic. The difficulty in reaching out of your shell and communicating your suffering is one of the major themes Ozeki explores through Nao and her father, and the deus ex machina of a fairy godmother dream sequence felt cheap.
Similarly, the themes of the relationship between reader and writer were overshadowed by the intensity of Nao’s life’s twists and turns. It seems the author might have found these two threads difficult to weave too. In balancing the development of Nao’s life and the frame story of Ruth reading and responding to the diary, the author had Ruth act inexplicably, like forgetting that a diary encased in a barnacle-encrusted lunchbox detailing events shortly after the dot-com bubble burst were not actively unfolding in the 2010s, or choosing to read the diary slowly so as to live at the same pace as Nao, while worrying incessantly about her welfare. Again, the various themes kept stepping on each other’s toes.
Nao’s great uncle was a pacifist Kamakazi pilot, and through learning about his experiences, Nao reflects on resolve and fortitude, finding the strength to pull through her own plight. Although these passages did contain some beautiful moments, I thought the book’s treatment of fascism was overly simplistic. All the fascists were incomprehensible bad people who were in positions of power: the prime minister, commanding officers in the army, etc. All the people portrayed with complexity were objectors to fascism: Nao’s family members, other soldiers in the fascist army. But this is never how fascism comes about: fascists are found amongst your neighbours and colleagues. Fascism’s sway is comprehensible. This element of the book is underdeveloped, perhaps because the book is already trying to accomplish too much and stumbling over itself. Nao’s uncle briefly describes (secondhand) the Nanjing Massacre, but the brutality of the Japanese treatment of China is not really tied to the brutality of Nao’s classmates towards her. It was a missed opportunity to explore the violent ideology and othering of fascism that continues on in our cultures. Perhaps fittingly, Heidegger's philosophy is also presented abstracted away from his Nazi past, a harmless well of wisdom about “authentic temporality, historicality, and Being-in-the-World” stripped of its fascistic implications.
Nao’s uncle commits suicide, intentionally landing his plane harmlessly in the sea. This is a heroic act, but it is also one that exonerates the individual without changing the battle lines between fascism and anti-fascism. Similarly, Nao’s father heroically sacrifices his career in objection to the military application of his inventions, but the relationship between Silicon Valley and the American military industrial complex blazes ahead unstopped. These acts of individual purity and detachment from the real world are consistent with the Buddhist philosophy explored through Nao’s grandmother. Life is about a search for personal enlightenment and lightness in one's soul, not a struggle against the fascistic violence that continues to cause suffering in our society.