A Tale for the Time Being

Nao, a Japanese American second generation or a teenage native Californian girl, experiences the pain and discomfort of being uprooted from her home in Silicon Valley after her father loses his job, prompting her family's move back to Tokyo. Identifying as an American, feeling like "an ordinary California girl adopted by Japanese parents," she feels alienated in her new environment and finds it difficult to relate to the Japanese part of her identity.[2] Part of this discomfort derives from the fact that – unlike her parents, who identify as Japanese and speak the language fluently – she only speaks Japanese on a conversational level and has very limited knowledge about, as well as exposure to, the culture.

Identifying more as an American, she feels a complete discord with her surroundings, and feels as if her "life is unreal, and Sunnyvale, which was real, was a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space."[3] She struggles in assimilating to a new, Japanese environment and experiences the disorientation of being viewed as "the other" in the country of her ethnic heritage. Her foreignness in Japan, as an American, causes relentless bullying from her classmates at a public Japanese school.

Not only does she have to grapple with her own social struggles, Nao is also plagued with an unhappy family life. Her father, unable to find a job in Japan, falls into a state of depression – withdrawing from the world and going into a state of social seclusion, or hikikomori – and attempts suicide twice. Her mother is constantly absent from the house, busy with her new job at a publishing firm, which she has taken up to compensate for her husband's unemployment.

Unable to find hope for the future in her current circumstances, Nao is considering suicide when she first starts writing her diary at a French maid café in Akihabara. Before she takes her own life, Nao is determined to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who is more than one hundred years old. Nao finds comfort in writing in her diary, addressing an imagined reader and friend. Nao becomes distracted while she is writing the diary, however, and what she actually ends up doing is capturing her own life to readers. Her diary entries cover a broad range of topics, and are characterized by their non-linear chronology; she jumps back in time to describe events that have taken place further back in the past, and makes frequent interjections – both to speak to the reader, and to send text messages to her grandmother.

Things start to look more positive after she spends a summer with her grandmother in Sendai, however. Jiko introduces Nao to new concepts such as zazen and helps her find a way to seek spiritual solace from her turbulent daily life and allow her to gain psychological strength to deal with difficult circumstances. Through Jiko, Nao forms a stronger connection to Japan. While Nao is in Sendai, she also unravels some family history, finding out about her great-uncle's involvement in World War II.

On the other side of the Pacific, Ruth, a novelist living on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the beach—possibly debris from the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Inside is Nao's diary, and Ruth becomes heavily invested in this narrative, and in finding out Nao's fate. Due to the geographic seclusion and rural nature of her home, Ruth feels isolated from the rest of the world in her environment. She feels a strong connection to Nao, and yearns to locate her in the real world in order to affirm her wellbeing. Ruth succeeds in finding several traces of Nao's father and great-grandmother online; however, her efforts to do so are continually thwarted. These attempts eventually culminate in a curious convergence between the two worlds.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many assimilation and immigration narratives had been published within the canon of Asian American women's literature; one example of such a novel is Jasmine. Ozeki's novel, however, marks the emergence of new genre of narratives: the return narrative, which depicts immigrants' assimilation back into the country of their ethnic heritage.

• Nao Yasutani – one of the protagonists of the novel, a 16-year-old native Nisei (second-generation Japanese American immigrant) Californian girl.
• Jiko Yasutani – Nao's great-grandmother, who is a Zen Buddhist nun. An anarchist, feminist, and novelist, who was also a "new Woman of the Taisho era".[4]
• Haruki #1 – Nao's great-uncle, a WWII soldier who supposedly died while carrying out a kamikaze mission over the pacific.
• Haruki #2 (or Harry Yasutani) – Nao's father who had a prestigious job at Silicon Valley, but is fired from his job and loses most of his savings after the dot-com bubble burst, prompting him and his family to move to Tokyo.
• Ruth – the other protagonist of the novel. A novelist facing the problem of writer's block.
• Oliver – Ruth's husband, who is an environmental artist.
• Pest, or Pesto - Ruth and Oliver's cat.

• 2015 Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award for Foreign Literature, from The Leo Tolstoy Museum and Estate, for A Tale for the Time Being. Ozeki was the first international recipient of this award.[5]
• 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Award (Fiction) longlist[6]
• 2014 Dos Passos Prize[7]
• 2014 Medici Book Club Prize[8]
• 2014 Canada-Japan Literary Award[9]
• 2014 The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic[10]
• 2013 Man Booker Prize shortlist. Ozeki was the first practicing Zen Buddhist priest to be shortlisted for the Man Booker.[11]
• 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction) shortlist[12][13]
• 2013 The Kitschies Red Tentacle for best novel[14]
• 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.[15]

• New York Times
• Los Angeles Times
• The Washington Post
• Publishers Weekly