A Tale for the Time Being

These twin stories come with their asymmetries. Where the novel’s third-person narrator follows Ruth’s inner states and actions, it merely excerpts Nao’s diary entries. The reader experiences the world from Ruth’s immediate perspective but only in a secondhand way for Nao. Their narratives read just as differently. Nao’s diary entries are lively, light, and childish—strung with hyperboles and interrupted by digressions as she texts Jiko or describes cartoon characters whose eyes go “zooming out of [their] sockets.” Ruth’s portions, by contrast, are pensive and reflective. They shift from her memories of her mother to her view of the Canadian wilderness. The novel’s double narratives allow it to sustain separate tones and registers.

Ruth and Nao’s dual stories support the novel’s meta-fictional conceit, in which their experiences tangle and nearly touch. Ruth’s story itself seems split in two—part of it bumps against the ordinary limitations of reality while the other half manages, improbably, to reach Nao’s. Ruth reads Nao’s diary more than a decade after Nao herself writes it. Counterintuitively, she still plays a part in shaping the story’s outcome. One moment, she loses the server when trying to search for Yasutani Jiko; after a power outage, though, she discovers new search hits about Japanese Shishsetsu. She struggles to find information about “Harry” Yasutani on the Internet but then meets him in a surrealist, dream-like sequence in her attempt to save Nao. Bound by reality but also freed by magical forces, Ruth becomes both a reader of—and an active participant in—Nao’s story. The novel presents still another twist: though Ruth’s chapters come in third-person narration, its footnotes feature her research and comments in her voice. It is as though Ruth is reviewing her own story, inserting her own thoughts into the narrative about herself. Through these layers of self-consciousness, A Tale for the Time Being comments on the process of reading.

Ozeki’s storytelling exploration inspires more playful approaches as well. Beyond Nao’s diary entries, the novel features excerpted email chains and translated letters. It even incorporates drawings and words that shape themselves into images. Nao draws out her name in the shape of a fish, and the Japanese crow—formed by nothing more than the word’s letters—guides Ruth through Nao’s parallel universe. Ozeki mixes media, texts, pictures, and words to create a novel whose form is as complex and textured as its plot.