A Tale For The Time Being: A Novel
By Ruth Ozeki
Summary
"In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home."
-Goodreads.com
Quotations
“The way you write ronin is 浪人 with the character for wave the character for person, which is pretty much how I feel, like a little wave person, floating around on the stormy sea of life."
“Home-leaving is a Buddhist euphemism for leaving the secular world and entering the monastic path, which was pretty much the opposite of what Ruth was contemplating when she pondered her return to the city. Zen Master Dōgen uses the phrase in “The Merits of Home-Leaving,” which is the title of Chapter 86 of his Shōbōgenzō. This is the chapter in which he praises his young monks for their commitment to a path of awakening and explicates the granular nature of time: the 6,400,099, 980 moments that constitute single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around."
“’Plastic is like that,’ Oliver was saying. ‘It never biodegrades. It gets churned around in the gyre and ground down into particles. Oceanographers call it confetti. In a granular state, it hangs around forever.’’
“In Japan some words have kotodama, which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power. The kotodama of now felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and a tail that looked something like this:
“Home-leaving is a Buddhist euphemism for leaving the secular world and entering the monastic path, which was pretty much the opposite of what Ruth was contemplating when she pondered her return to the city. Zen Master Dōgen uses the phrase in “The Merits of Home-Leaving,” which is the title of Chapter 86 of his Shōbōgenzō. This is the chapter in which he praises his young monks for their commitment to a path of awakening and explicates the granular nature of time: the 6,400,099, 980 moments that constitute single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around."
“’Plastic is like that,’ Oliver was saying. ‘It never biodegrades. It gets churned around in the gyre and ground down into particles. Oceanographers call it confetti. In a granular state, it hangs around forever.’’
“In Japan some words have kotodama, which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power. The kotodama of now felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and a tail that looked something like this:
NOW felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. I was just a kid, and I thought if I could truly grasp the meaning of the big fish NOW, I would be able to save the little fish Nakao, but the word always slipped away from me.
I guess I was about six or seven by then, and I used to sit in the backseat of our Volvo station wagon, looking out at the golf courses and shopping malls and housing developments and factories and salt ponds streaming by on the Bayshore Freeway, and in the distance the water of San Francisco Bay was all blue and sparkling , and I kept the window open so the hot, dry, smoggy haze could blow on my face while I whispered Now! . . . Now! . . . Now! . . . over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the world was what it is when now became NOW.
But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then. Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I’d start making it shorter . . . now, ow, oh, o . . . until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless. like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too."
“It’s the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something horrible is happening.”
"Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. 'A wave is born from the deep conditions of the ocean,' she said. 'A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person,wave.' "
I guess I was about six or seven by then, and I used to sit in the backseat of our Volvo station wagon, looking out at the golf courses and shopping malls and housing developments and factories and salt ponds streaming by on the Bayshore Freeway, and in the distance the water of San Francisco Bay was all blue and sparkling , and I kept the window open so the hot, dry, smoggy haze could blow on my face while I whispered Now! . . . Now! . . . Now! . . . over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the world was what it is when now became NOW.
But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then. Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I’d start making it shorter . . . now, ow, oh, o . . . until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless. like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too."
“It’s the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something horrible is happening.”
"Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. 'A wave is born from the deep conditions of the ocean,' she said. 'A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person,wave.' "