The two lives, Ruth’s and Nao’s, are connected through the journal, through writing. (She calls suicide ‘graduating from time’ or ‘dropping out of time’.) According to her diaries, Nao had a great life in silicone valley before returning to Japan, where she suffered terrible abuse at school, difficulties in her family and is considering suicide. The reader is invited to consider both Ruth’s life, and the story of the younger girl revealed through the diaries, and the connections between them. She finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox on the shore containing the journal of a Japanese teenager, Nao. Ruth is a Japanese Canadian, like her namesake. She is a novelist who has interrupted her writing of novels to compose a memoir of her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. Ruth is the narrator (she shares a name with the author) and lives with her husband and cat on an island off the west coast of Canada – remote then. There are two main characters, both female. One the attractions for me of A Tale for the Time Being is the great older woman: old Jiko, who is an anarchist, a writer, a Buddhist nun, a teacher, the grandmother of one of the protagonists, and 104 years old with a wicked sense of humour and penetrating wisdom. It was shortlisted but frankly any one of the six could have won – they are all so good. It would not have surprised me if this book had won the Man Booker Prize in October. This is a strange and clever book, and I loved getting into it, losing myself in its stories and ideas.
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