By FELICIA R. LEE - The New York Times - Published: March 12, 2013
Nao was easy. The voice of the quirky, troubled 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl whose words begin “A Tale for the Time Being,” Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, came to the author as she was immersed in a Buddhist teaching. But it took five frustrating years for Ms. Ozeki to round out the story.
For one thing, she was caught in “a bit of a grief fog” after her mother’s death from cancer, she said. And she had a devil of a time conjuring the character who would find Nao’s diary washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox on an island off British Columbia. “Time Being,” Ms. Ozeki’s third novel, alternates between Nao’s purple squiggles and the story of Ruth, who finds the journal and sets out to discover its writer’s fate. Along the way the novel considers Buddhism, the writer-reader relationship and the nature of time.
The book Ms. Ozeki began in 2006 was not cooked to her satisfaction when she handed it over to her editor in early 2011, already a long time after her last novel, “All Over Creation,” came out in 2003.
“Then the earthquake and tsunami hit,” said Ms. Ozeki, a thin, intense 57-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair and a disarmingly direct gaze. “Japan was changed. And I realized that the book I had just written was irrelevant. It no longer made any sense at all.
“I just threw away half the book,” she went on during an interview in the Manhattan office of her publisher, Viking. “It felt like such a relief.”
The tsunami worked its way in, as did the character who shares more than the novelist’s name: She’s a blocked writer who lives on Cortes Island, British Columbia, with her husband, Oliver, and their cat. (Only the cat’s name is changed.)
The novel’s Ruth translates and footnotes the diary she discovers. Nao writes about being bullied in school in Tokyo, her father’s lingering despair after being booted from his Silicon Valley job, and her efforts to write a memoir of her 104-year-old great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun.
Ruth, also struggling to write a memoir, asks: Is Nao real? Did she survive the tsunami? How old is she now? Did she commit suicide as she threatened in her diary?
Ms. Ozeki’s first novel, “My Year of Meats” (1998), about two very different women, the news media and the politics of the meat industry, made a splash. “All Over Creation“ was about farm life and environmental activists in Idaho.
“Readers got distracted by the themes in the first two novels,” Ms. Ozeki said. “I became seen as a political activist.”
The new novel is less directly political, and what was loosely autobiographical in “My Year of Meats” becomes overtly self-referential here.
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