Slipping and sliding in and out of time, her tale takes flight when a woman (coincidentally named Ruth) happens on 'a message in a bottle' as she walks the beach near her British Columbia home.Īttracted by a “tiny sparkle,” Ruth picks up a barnacle-encrusted package, containing a Hello Kitty lunchbox, a diary, a clutch of Japanese letters and a Kamikaze (“sky soldier”) watch. Ruth the character is a stand-in for Ruth Ozeki, the author of A Tale for the Time Being, and Ruth’s fascination with Nao can be read as an author’s immersion in a character’s story.Ruth Ozeki folllows her much-admired My Year of Meats with a magical narrative, A Tale for the Time Being, that dances in all worlds at once. Still, reading the diary helps Ruth realize that she is happy in the present moment. At the end of the novel, Ruth hasn’t solved many of the novel’s mysteries-she still hasn’t tracked down Nao, and she has no idea how the diary ended up in the ocean.
This, in turn, saves Nao from committing suicide. When Nao’s diary entries suddenly end, leading Ruth to believe that Nao must have killed herself, Ruth is able to “rewrite” Nao’s life: she visits Haruki in a dream and convinces him not to kill himself. She realizes that it is important to not dwell in the past since life is constantly changing-for Ruth, the past is represented by her memoir. As she reads more of the diary, Ruth, too, becomes influenced by Nao’s great-grandmother Jiko’s words on the importance of living each moment mindfully. She becomes worried for Nao as she reads about her troubles, and she frantically begins looking for Nao and her family online to see if they are alive-but she finds nothing concrete. Like Nao, Ruth has lived in Japan and America, so she understands both cultures. When Nao’s diary washes up on Ruth’s shore, it is a welcome distraction. Ruth now finds this project unpleasant, but she feels she has worked on it too long to abandon it.
For the past 10 years, she has been working on a memoir about caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. Though the move was voluntary, Ruth feels displaced and stifled on the island, and she finds unable to write. Ruth used to live in Manhattan but moved to the island to be with her husband, Oliver. She finds Nao’s diary when it washes ashore on the island.
Ruth is a writer who lives in Whaletown on a remote island in Canada.
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