Opening it, she finds, sealed in a plastic bag, some items including Nao’s journal. One day in 2012, as she is out on the coast, she finds that a Hello Kitty lunchbox has washed ashore. She is having a bad time with writer’s block and should really be finishing a memoir. She’s a writer (so yeah, the author of the book is named Ruth, and there is this whole idea of transcending place and time). Ruth-a main character in the book-lives with her husband on a remote island in the North Pacific, part of British Columbia, Canada. And pretty quickly, she is telling her own story. Nao reflects on her great-grandmother’s life as it relates to Nao’s own life. But, considering the horrors of her life and the fact that her own father has attempted suicide more than once, at sixteen, Nao has decided to ‘drop outside of time.’ That is, she plans to kill herself.īefore Nao can commit suicide, she wants to write out the story of her awesome great-grandmother who is a Zen Buddhist nun and the mother of a World War II kamikaze pilot. Nao tells us that she is a ‘time being’-someone who lives inside of time, as we all do. Some of the things they do are downright bizarre, but a quick check against factual documents lets the reader know that the weird things Nao’s classmates do are not unheard of in Japan. They take full advantage of this and bully her mercilessly. She’s a cultural outsider in many ways, and simply doesn’t fit in with her classmates.

In dire straits, the family has no choice but to move back to Japan.Īs Nao has never lived in Japan, her Japanese language skills aren’t so great. But as time passes, her dad and his projects become superfluous. Nao, a Japanese American girl, was born in California’s Silicon Valley, her father a successful ‘dot-com’ programmer.

A tale for the time being meaning