A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

This fascinating and elegant novel begins when Ruth, a Japanese-American writer and a New Yorker, discovers on the beach of a remote island at the north end of the Strait of Georgia, an object sealed in a plastic bag. It's a Japanese child's lunch box containing the journal/diary of Nao, a bright 14 year old Japanese girl, two packets of letters, one in Japanese and one in French, and a wrist watch.

Ruth is stuck in her years long effort to complete a memoir, so she begins reading Nao's journal/diary and is immediately captivated. The novel is structured by alternating between segments of Nao's writing and a narrative reporting Ruth's intense, almost obsessive research, seeking to know what might be Nao's fate, since Nao's sealed lunch box may be flotsam from the epically destructive Fukushima earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of 2011. Or could it be jetsam, something like a bottle with a note in it, tossed in the sea so that fate and the forces of nature carry it to some receptive soul?

Nao's story is compelling and compellingly told. She grew up in Sunnyvale, California, where her father was a software engineer. Her father having lost his job, the family moved back to Tokyo, just as Nao is starting middle school. Her classmates see her as an outsider and bully her continuously, viciously, brutally. Since her father is unemployed and sunk in deep depression and her mother is fully concentrated on keeping the family afloat, Nao feels abandoned. A saving grace is Nao's great-grandmother Jiko, 104 years old and a Zen Buddhist nun. Nao spends a life-saving summer with her.

Through Jiko, Nao learns about her great uncle Haruki, who was a pacifist university student studying philosophy and French poetry, during World War II, when the military drafts him and trains him to be a kamikaze pilot. More brutality. The letters in Japanese are his official letters home during that training. Those in French record his real experience and thoughts.

This novel is richly layered with Japanese pop culture and ancient lore, with fine musings on the meaning of time, with details of the Japanese military during World War 11, the Fukushima disaster, with quantum physics, and detailed knowledge about ocean ecology, and more.

Through the power of magical realism, the lives of Ruth and Nao interpenetrate. For me the central treasure of this wonderful novel is Nao-honest, smart, observant, anxious, kind, generous spirited, and funny. Author Ruth Ozeki gets her just right. Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist priest and teaches creative writing at Smith College. Those lucky students!