#and ruth ozeki’s tale for the time being

[spiritbreak-archive]

finished the memory police for the second time and i can confirm, this is my favorite book of all time. this and fruiting bodies by kathryn harlan. i read the memory police for the first time back in march of 2021, and a LOT has changed in my life since my first read. on my second read i picked up a lot more details which proves that this book is a fucking masterpiece. the attention to detail, the environmental storytelling, the characterization…….. GOD this book is good.

strongly recommend this to anyone looking for a beautiful, devastating, and evocative novel about the trauma of loss and unkillable hope in the face of oppression.

[haveyoureadthispoll]

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, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

[aseaofquotes]

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

[woahjo]

if i made a book club community on tumblr to talk about books we/people are reading, would anyone be interested?

[wehavewords]

"The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again."

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

[therefugeofbooks]

Currently reading A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

[freakinflipflop]

Thinking about how people in my high school English class hated on A Tale For The Time Being for Nao being "too pretentious" bc of the black coffee scene and for the depiction of Nao being passively encouraged to do sex work. Like sorry that you can't enjoy a moving story about cultural disconnect and isolation just bc the main character is a depressed teenager with very few social connections. As if that isn't one of the driving forces of the story. As if that characterization of her apathy after going through a lot of shit isn't core to the idea of disconnect and reaching across worlds for connection. Sorry that you're too caught up in "haha edgy teen ew she's not relatable" to dive wholeheartedly into a fascinating and deeply moving story. Whatever I'll just have to cherish the book forever instead.

Anyways Ruth Ozeki if you're reading this your writing is awesome and mind-opening and I think about it a lot

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[ninasbookshelf]

re-reading an old favorite - a tale for the time being by ruth ozeki

[spilled-latte-enjoyer]

“not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. it keeps all the worlds alive.”

[commonplacenook]

Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader's eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

[pg13judaskiss]

Mom was almost never at home at the time. She was into her jellyfish phase, and she used to spend all day at the invertebrate tank in the city aquarium, where she would sit, clutching her old Gucci handbag, watching kurage (水母 — jellyfish; lit. "water" + "mother") through the glass. I know this because she took me there once. It was the only thing that relaxed her. She had read somewhere that watching kurage was beneficial to your health because it reduces stress levels, only the problem was that a lot of other housewives had read that same article, so it was always crowded in front of the tank, and the aquarium had to set out folding chairs, and you had to get there really early in order to get a good spot, all of which was very stressful. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure she was having a nervous breakdown at the time, but I remember how pale and beautiful she looked with her delicate profile against the watery blue tank, and her bloodshot eyes following the drift of the pink and yellow jellyfish as they floated by like pulsing pastel-colored moons, trailing their long tentacles behind them.

A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozeki

[rainyflowersstuff]

Something I worked on for an assignment, based on a book I really liked called "A tale for the time being" by Ruth Ozeki

[heejinsoulyves]

I finished A Tale for the Time Being today and it's soooo good I didn't want it to end. Nao is one of the realest and most entertaining characters I've ever read.

Also look at these covers!!

[bunnyinatree]

"A Tale for the Time Being" was amazing from start to finish, and I am furiously spinning plot points and characters around in my head right now.

I'm specifically heartbroken and feral over the fact that Haruki #1 repeatedly emphasized how well his mother knew him—"I truly believe that although you have not laid eyes on these pages, still you have read every word I have written. You, dear Mother, know my true heart" (328)—and even though she (presumably) never learned the true nature of his death, she still taught Nao how to bully waves in an uncanny parallel to Haruki #1's near-final words: "Better to do battle with the waves, who may yet forgive me" (328).

I wonder what sorts of parallels you can draw between characters using the theme of parent-child relationships. Jiko and Haruki #1 were incredibly close and understood each other's true feelings without having to say them out loud (similar to what happens with Nao at Jiko's deathbed), which contrasts sharply with Nao's isolation from her father, Haruki #2. Neither truly understands the suffering that the other is going through, and the heart of the matter is often hidden from view (or intentionally obscured by either Nao or her father).

Then, in one of the final portions of the book (Appendix E), Ozeki talks about Hugh Everett, who supposedly remarked after his daughter's suicide attempt, "I didn't know she was so sad" (417). I think all of this ties into the themes of communication and connection in the novel and how words can reveal the truth of the matter.

Speaking of which, the story of the Sixth Patriarch and the finger pointing at the Moon absolutely rocked my word. I truly feel like this image right now:

[image ID: an edit of the feral keyboard smash drawing, where the humanoid creature with red eyes is vigorously shaking the novel "A Tale for the Time Being" by Ruth Ozeki. End image ID.]

[pynkhues]

Have you read any books lately that you've loved?

I have a problem where I keep buying books much faster than I can finish them. I just tell myself I'm performing a valuable service and supporting the authors lol

Hahaha, I mean!! By buying a lot of books, you certainly are ;-)

In terms of books I've loved recently, I just finished Alice Pung's One Hundred Days last night, which was wonderful. The blurb calls it a fractured-fairytale, and it is, but it's also in a lot of ways a bit of a gothic lit story of a teenage girl who finds herself pregnant and locked in an apartment with her mother. Pung's probably one of my favourite Australian authors at the moment. Her memoir Her Father's Daughter and YA novel Laurinda are both great reads too, and she's just got a really wonderful voice as a novelist. Her work tends to explore a lot about immigrant families in Australia, the cultural divide between East Asia and South East Asia and Australia, and the nature of being a third-culture kid (she herself is Australian, but of Chinese-Cambodian descent).

I'm currently also about halfway through Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing, which is heavy, but excellent in ways that I can't articulate yet, and I've also (unusually for me actually!) been reading a lot of poetry lately? I'm a few poems off finishing Desiree Dallagiacomo's Sink, which I think is pretty good, and recently re-read two Australian collections - Krissy Kneen's Eating My Grandmother and Omar Sakr's The Lost Arabs, which are both collections I really love and think about a lot.

(I've also read a lot of Not Great Stuff recently, hahaha, but I'll spare you those!)