A Tale for the Time Being

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 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 a ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, 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 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 a 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 humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.