WORDS: Lily Ní Dhomhnaill
There are 6,400,099,980 Buddhist moments in every day, 65 in the snap of a finger. To be aware of each and every one of these moments is to be truly aware of the passing of time, to live- to use an overworked but appropriate phrase- ‘in the now.’ Nao, our appropriately named protagonist invites us to count these moments with her as she writes in purple ink between the covers of a copy of A la recherché du temps perdu, in a seedy escort café in Tokyo. Later, by chance or karmic intervention, a middle-aged novelist, Ruth, finds the book, encased in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, washed up on the shore of an island on the other side of the Pacific. Throw in a WWII kamikaze pilot, an anarchist feminist nun, Schrodinger’s cat, vicious cyber-bullying, origami insects folded with pages of the works of Heidegger, 9/11, a tsunami, a suicidal father, a senile mother, Pacific rubbish-rivers, the Silicon Valley and a potentially magical crow, and you’re getting closer to the chaotic and brilliant vision of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For The Time Being.
“A time being,” Nao tells us, “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.” Pervading the novel is a sense of interconnectedness of everything and everyone, as implied by the Zen Buddist philosophy that adds such rich texture, but also by discussions of quantum theory and the tidal drifts of the Pacific ocean, on which flotsam from the tsunami washes up in Canada.
Elaborate? Certainly. Especially taking into account that all this is filtered through the mind of a 16-year-old girl. Raised in California and recently returned to Japan, Nao writes with all the irreverence of an American teenager, calling ‘Yo, Dad! There’s two bald midgets here to see you’ when her great-grandmother and another Buddhist nun call to the door. This is ancient culture of the Zen religion as seen through the eyes of an adolescent Californian. Of the Japanese countryside, she says ‘I didn’t get the feeling there were many hot tubs or pools or celebrity mansions around here.’ She translates a routine temple prayer as ‘As I go for a dump / I pray with all beings / that we can remove all filth and destroy / the poisons of greed, anger and foolishness.’ However, despite the flippant and sometimes irritating narrative style, Ozeki still manages to portray a unique sense of the sublime (‘I felt as if the world was tipping and pitching me forward down the mountainside into the long throat of the night’) and sensitively detail the teachings and practices of Zen Buddhism.
Meanwhile, Ruth becomes engulfed by Nao’s story from the comfort of British Columbia, where she lives with her husband. Ostensibly, they lead very different lives, the peace (or boredom) of Ruth’s quiet island life contrasts with Nao’s turbulent existence. They are both exiles. Both have moved from a home which they still feel a strong connection to, and longing for – Nao from California, Ruth from Manhattan – and feel out of place in their new and alien environment. But even more evident is a sort of temporal exile, in that they are both homesick for a different time. Ruth has spent 15 years trying, and failing, to write a memoir, and Nao dreams of travelling back to meet her pilot-philosopher grand uncle. As the novel progresses however, the past is shown to be closer, and the world smaller, than Nao, Ruth or the reader would expect. The frequent and apparently random segment breaks create the impression of time as a combination of fragmentary moments, slipping and shifting into varying sequences. Deliberately chaotic, the novel constantly reiterates the interconnectedness of everything, and the strange, fragmented nature of understanding time.
As well as time, suicide, memory and family, this is a story about stories. The tale for the time being passes from Nao to Ruth the character, to Ruth the author, to the reader of the novel. As we follow Ruth following Nao we are made very aware of the collaborative reader-writer relationship. Despite a few slightly incredible plot components (Ruth deciding to read the diary in segments and not all at once, for example) there is still a sense of Nao’s voice cutting through fragments of time and space from the very first line (‘Hi! My name is Nao…’). Whether the fragments come together and form a story around the voice is debatable, and in the end, entirely up to us.
