A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki, The Canons 2013
Does there come a point in every modern novel about Japan where you read something you wish you hadn’t? It happened with Murakami, and without wanting to put you off from the start, it’s happened with this extraordinary novel (shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize) by Ruth Ozeki.
Ostensibly the tale of a troubled teenager in Tokyo and a procrastinating writer living on the wild coast of north-west Canada, the book is both page-turner and profound meditation on time, history, love, Proust – and quantum mechanics: Schrödinger’s paradoxical cat puts in a guest appearance.
The events spool out from Ruth’s discovery of a Hello Kitty lunch box washed up on the beach some months after the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Her exploration of the diary and letters she finds in it draws her in to the world of Nao, a fifteen-year-old apparently on the brink of suicide.
Nao’s misfortune is to have spent her early years in California, so she is different from her classmates, and woe betide anyone who is different in a Japanese school. It makes you the target of monstrous bullying, known as ijime, that Japan seems incapable of stamping out. Yet again, the extraordinary contradiction at the heart of Japanese culture arises: how can a nation that sets such great store by correct behaviour and produces such exquisite art entertain such extreme cruelty (the descriptions of how young kamikaze pilots were brutalised in preparation for their mission are unsparing) and the sexualisation of young girls?
The escalating bullying (in which Nao‘s class teacher is complicit) and the vile consequences of it make or a difficult read, but thankfully Nao finds her salvation through her indomitable 104-year-old great-grandmother, an early feminist and writer turned Buddhist nun. The austere but gentle routines of her remote monastery, her tolerant wisdom – and her liking for simple pleasures such as sitting on the beach eating sweets – bring Nao a measure of peace and new resolve.
It is Ruth’s persistent search across the internet as she seeks to make sense of her find that drives the unfolding story, but somehow I always wanted to get back to Nao’s narrative, even though the harshness of Ruth’s Canadian wilderness seems preferable to the to the infernal vision of Tokyo that Ozeki presents:
‘Everywhere you look you can see bright anime posters and gigantic banners hanging from the tops of buildings, with pictures of towering moe [budding] girls with round sparkling eyes the size of kids’ swimming pools and humongous luscious tits busting out of their galactic superhero reformer costumes, and all you can hear is the crazy clang! clang! clang! of the of the game arcades and the ping! ping! ping! Of the pachinko parlours…’
A Tale for the Time being is rich with stories and different narrative voices: Nao’s uncle, the kamikaze pilot she never met; diaries and letters, crude threats on scraps of paper. Signs and portents give warning, but also guidance: where has the Jungle Crow come from and what is his meaning? The ancestors are never far away, in memory, of course, but also almost tangibly present in night-time encounters that may or may not be dreams. Dreams themselves may have powers that we did not expect, yet real events, like 09/11, tether us to reality.
For all its occasional horrors, it’s a book to bathe in and emerge refreshed.