She is overwhelmed by her problems, and she says that she, too, will die after she writes down the life story of her great-grandmother, Jiko, who is a Buddhist nun. He doesn’t succeed, but after the attempt, Nao constantly worries. Haruki feels like a failure, and he attempts suicide.

Haruki is unable to find a job in Japan, so the family is forced to live in a tiny, rundown apartment. She feels like a cultural misfit in Japan, and she is severely bullied by her classmates who consider her to be a foreigner. Nao used to live in California but moved back to Japan after her father, Haruki, lost his job. Nao begins her diary by saying that she and her reader are both “time beings,” or impermanent creatures. As Ruth becomes invested in Nao’s story, the novel switches between Nao’s diary and Ruth’s narrative. Inside it, she is surprised to find an old wind-up watch, some letters written in Japanese, and a diary written in English by a 15-year-old girl named Nao from Tokyo. Ruth, a writer who lives on a remote Canadian island, finds a lunch box washed up on the beach.

Part III, Chapter 7: Haruki #1’s Secret French Diary.

Part II, Chapter 13: Haruki #1’s Letters.

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. 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. 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. A diary is Nao's only solace-and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. 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 brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness Finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award '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.

A tale for the time being a novel