A book review’s purpose is to both summarise the plot of a novel and capture its essence, to help the book find appropriate readers. To summarise the plot of Ruth Ozeki’s Booker-nominated novel is to do it a grave disservice. To capture its essence is impossible within a review, because this is a niche book for a specific kind of reader. If your interests lie at the interconnectedness of things, in the spaces of overlap among seemingly disparate disciplines like quantum physics and storytelling, then A Tale for the Time Being is the next book you should read.

An ocean separates the two main characters of the novel. They never meet. They are separated by both time and space. But the 16-year-old Naoko communicates very intimately with the much older Ruth. It’s Naoko’s diary, addressed to the reader, which forms a link between the two. The diary begins: “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being … A time being is someone who lives in time.” And how does the diary come into Ruth’s possession? It crosses the ocean wrapped in a plastic package, and placed in a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Incredible as that sounds, the transport is given more weight when Ruth

begins to believe that its owner lost the lunchbox and the diary in the tsunami of 2011. Ruth’s reading of the diary becomes a search for what happened to Naoko.

Ruth’s work and life are at a vital junction when she finds Naoko’s diary. Her partner Oliver is suffering from some mysterious ailment, and their secluded home in Canada has brought peace but not productivity in her writing. She has been working on her family’s memoirs for years now, without coming close to an actual book. Her frustration with work and the lack of stimulus she used to find in city life drive Ruth to attach considerable significance to finding Naoko’s diary inside a lunchbox on the beach.

The mystery of what has happened to Naoko, and what that might mean for Ruth, remains a mental mathematics exercise for much of the novel. Meanwhile, the groundwork is laid down for exposition of both of their narratives. Naoko has a suicidal father, and Ruth lives with someone who is prone to the most out-there non-sequiturs. At one point, with Ruth and Oliver lying in bed, he blurts out, “Interesting about the crows.” And though it may seem tangential to both Ruth and the reader of both Ruth’s and Naoko’s narratives, the pay-off of reading through the next few paragraphs to make the same connections as Oliver is quite satisfying.

And what happens in the novel? This is one of those novels that some readers would grimace when remembering the month spent reading it. “Nothing happens,” they might say. And they would be right. Other readers would be as correct, if they enthusiastically said, “It’s not about what happens. It’s about everything.” The second type of reader suits this novel best; Ozeki’s book deserves someone patient and indulgent — someone willing to listen to a good tale, and spend the time doing it.

At its heart, the novel is about a spunky girl who gets bullied for being different, someone who is constantly worried about her father’s impending suicide. But it is also about the purpose of telling stories, the worth of creating something that does not exist. And it is about staring into an abyss that stares right back, and about bending the mind around philosophical conundrums such as Schrödinger’s Cat.

Ozeki writes the two narratives extremely well. She also ties the two together superbly, so that one’s beginning and the other’s end are lost in twining, helical illusion. Peripheral characters such as the walking almanac Oliver and Naoko’s grandmother Jiko, an eccentric Buddhist Monk, become instruments in the marriage of Eastern philosophy with science. It sounds like New Age mish-mash when summarised, but reads eloquently with nuanced treatment in the novel.

The book’s most pleasing element is its prose. The language and tone are just right for telling this complex story in which “so much of nothing” happens, and keeps happening for over 400 pages. She marries divergent streams of thought with deft sentences like: “Dad said they took me on the train to visit a couple of times when I was a baby too, but then we moved to Sunnyvale and I didn’t see Jiko again until after they found Dad on the tracks and I learned what kind of man he was.”

What probably helped Ruth Ozeki the writer is to write about someone named Ruth, someone she can insert as her own self into the novel. It probably also helped her to write about something she knows a lot about already. The author of A Tale for the Time Being is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest. Much of the wisdom she shares through Jiko’s character is actually her own philosophy, or that of her teachers. And Jiko does say a lot of touching things without making them maudlin. She vows to seek enlightenment only after all other humans have already reached it.

There are many readers who might think Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being clever and inventive, but a smaller subset of them will have the patience to read the entire book. For those few who reach the other side, the book and its ending will be worth the time spent.

The reviewer teaches rhetoric at LUMS

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A Tale for the Time Being

(Novel)

By Ruth Ozeki

Viking Press, US

ISBN 978-0670026630

432pp.