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Dec 29, 2016
A Tale for the Time Being is Ruth Ozeki's exploration of Buddhist concept's of time. She explores how time passes for different people depending on their situation, integrating Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics. The book also provided a glimpse at life in contemporary Japan. Ozeki used her characters to demonstrate how time impacted them. She jumped primarily between two main characters, Naoko and Ruth (presumably the author herself). Naoko, Nao for short, was a Japanese teenager who wrote a diary that Ruth found washed up in the Pacific Northwest. Ruth experienced time vicariously through Nao's diary and got wrapped up in her struggles as an outcast at her high school. Nao, on the other hand, learned to take the world as it comes and struggles to let go of her upsetting past in order to live for the present moment. Nao found ways to cope with her own struggles by learning from her grandmother, a Buddhist nun she called Old Jiko, how to let things go and move on. "[Old Jiko] learned how to open up her heart so that the whale [of sadness] could swim away" (p. 180). Nao spent a summer with Old Jiko and learned how to let things go. Nao experienced the NOW and reveled in it as she learned Japanese Buddhist drumming. "When you beat a drum you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder" (p. 238). Other characters encountered as explorations of time were Nao's suicidal father for whom time and history were a big weight and Old Jiko's brother who was a kamikaze pilot in World War II for whom time was limited so he tried to live to the fullest within the constraints of the military and his own expiration date. Ozeki also explored contemporary observations of time in the novel. Such as, how we experience time and life when Google searches are ever-present. A valuable lesson was learned from Nao as she resisted cyber-bullying by disappearing from the internet, "...anonymity is the new celebrity... because true freedom comes from being unknown" (p. 383). Ruth lived vicariously through reading the diary of Naoko as well as through her own internet research to try and find Nao. Ruth was escapist in many respects as she tried to piece together a story of a Japanese teen that had very little practical impact on her life in the Pacific Northwest. Thanks to online searches and Ruth's Japanese heritage she did not feel completely removed from Nao's situation. Ruth explored time as it related to quantum physics to help justify her intense remote engagement in Nao's life. She weaved in concepts of time from quantum physics such as how multiple possibilities can exist all at once in different dimensions. Ruth, through her understanding of quantum physics came to the realization that "...not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive" (p. 402). Ruth wanted Nao's life to persist in all its possibilities and it was able to in her imagination as long as some of the mystery of her time and life remained in the dark. Ozeki's book was an illuminating trip through time- or at least concepts of time.