Nao has spent most of her life in Sunnyvale, Calif., where her father was a Silicon Valley highflier. Now she sets out again to link two people on opposite sides of the Pacific. Whenever the word “time” comes up - “wasting time,” “about time,” “in time” - the reader must stop and think about the many angles of approach to that subject in Ruth Ozeki’s delightful yet sometimes harrowing new novel, “A Tale for the Time Being.” Ozeki’s quirky and passionate first novel, “My Year of Meats,” introduced a Japanese-American television producer to a Japanese housewife her second, “All Over Creation,” was set in rural Idaho. Inside is Nao’s diary, written in purple ink. But Proust’s book is no more than a cover. It contains, it appears, a copy of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and a broken watch, along with some letters. Many months later, after Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, a Japanese-American novelist named Ruth, living on an island off the coast of British Columbia, finds a barnacle-encrusted freezer bag washed up on the beach. She is, she declares, a “time being,” with all the ambiguity that phrase implies. Nao, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, is in a cafe in Tokyo, writing in her diary.
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