Nao begins her diary by saying that she and her reader are both “time beings,” or impermanent creatures. As Ruth becomes invested in Nao’s story, the novel switches between Nao’s diary and Ruth’s narrative. Inside it, she is surprised to find an old wind-up watch, some letters written in Japanese, and a diary written in English by a 15-year-old girl named Nao from Tokyo. Ruth, a writer who lives on a remote Canadian island, finds a lunch box washed up on the beach.
Part III, Chapter 7: Haruki #1’s Secret French Diary.Part II, Chapter 13: Haruki #1’s Letters.And just as the gyres have connected the diary with Ruth, so reading the diary links Ruth to Nao in a deep way the act of reading having influence over the act of story-telling and vice versa. In Japan, Nao's father is a programmer with ideas about quantum computing, while back in Canada, Ruth's partner Oliver is an autodidact scientist and artist, on hand to explain about Schröding-er's cat and the fact that observing a quantum event affects the outcome of that event. So, there are stories within stories here, and we haven't even got to the physics stuff yet. Nao's life is transformed through her engagement with Jiko's life, and during Jiko's story we also learn the fate of her son, Haruki, a promising student conscripted into becoming a kamikaze pilot during the last days of the Second World War. How has the diary wound up here on the other side of the world?Īt the same time, Nao is attempting to write the life story of her great-grandmother Jiko, a fantastic 104-year-old feminist and radical Buddhist monk living in a remote temple in the north-east of Japan. On reading the diary, Ruth discovers that it belongs to a 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl called Nao, writing a decade previously in Tokyo. Inside are a diary, a collection of Japanese letters and an old watch. The central premise of A Tale for the Time Being is a fantastic narrative hook: while out walking on the beach one day in remote Northwestern Canada, a struggling writer called Ruth finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox wrapped in an airtight freezer bag. Links have been made between these two disparate fields before, but seldom can they have been intertwined with such emotive power and linguistic grace as Ruth Ozeki manages in this funny, heartbreaking, moving and profound novel. The interconnectedness of all things is a familiar cornerstone of the Buddhist religion, as well as one of the fascinating upshots of modern quantum physics.
0 kommentar(er)
