A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth, a novelist on a remote Canadian island, finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed ashore. Inside is the diary of Nao, a 16-year-old Tokyo girl who plans to record her great-grandmother's life as a Buddhist nun before ending her own. As Ruth reads, the diary seems to respond to her, and the boundary between reader and writer thins. Ozeki weaves in quantum mechanics, the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, kamikaze pilots, schoolyard bullying, and a French philosopher's question about whether a watched diary changes its writer. The book asks what it means to keep someone alive by paying attention to them.