Review of A Tale for the Time Being

I recently read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. The story is told through two narrators, Nao, a teenager living in Japan, and Ruth, a Japanese writer living on a remote island off the coast of Canada with her husband, Oliver. Ruth finds a diary written by Nao, through which we learn about Nao’s story alongside Ruth and Oliver.

(Spoilers to follow!)

Throughout the book, I found Nao’s story to be the much more compelling one. Nao doesn’t have an easy life. She undergoes severe bullying at school, her father attempts suicide and lives as a hikikomori, she quits school and briefly works at a maid cafe. Ruth, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a plot going for her. Ruth is a writer who is supposed to be writing her own memoir, but keeps putting it off, and she is still affected by her mother’s recent passing away from Alzheimer’s, which occasionally makes her worry that she is also going to develop dementia. Ruth is mostly obsessed with Nao and goes on a mission to research who Nao is and where she is now.

It wasn’t until a dream sequence Ruth has about three quarters into the book, where she follows a fish into a mirrored room, looking for Nao (as the mirror was the only “logical place” to look for Nao, says Ruth), that I realized, Ruth is the same person as Nao! Timeline-wise, it made sense. Nao was writing her diary during 2001, as she references the events of 9/11. Ruth, meanwhile, is about ten years older than Nao and the story takes place around 2011, as she believes that Naoko’s diary was carried to Canada following the 2011 tsunami in Japan. And an old contact of Nao’s family writes to Ruth near the end of the story and shares that although it has been many years, the last update he heard is that Nao went to Canada to study French. The only explanation for why Ruth doesn’t recognize that she herself is Nao is that Ruth is already suffering from memory loss, much like her mother did.

Connecting the dots backwards, there were so many hints for this that I was slightly annoyed that I hadn’t realized it earlier, as a more astute reader would have. At the beginning of the book, Ruth “discovers” Nao’s diary by picking up a trash bag on the beach, intending to throw it away. Her husband Oliver, upon seeing the bag, brings it into the house against Ruth’s wishes (it’s garbage! she protests) and dumps out the contents, including Nao’s (Ruth’s) diary. But of course, Oliver must have known what the bag contained already. Presumably Ruth had gone out earlier for a walk with the bag and simply forgotten she was holding it.

Then there was the fact that we knew nothing about Ruth’s childhood or about her dad, a prominent figure in Nao’s diary, from Ruth’s narration. This made sense because Ruth’s childhood was the story Nao was already telling in the diary. And the memoir that Ruth was supposed to be writing? It was Nao’s (Ruth’s) diary! Right before the dream sequence with the mirror, Ruth had found to her surprise that the last pages of the diary were suddenly blank, when she distinctly remembers that there had been writing on those pages when she first opened it after picking it up from the beach. After sharing this with Oliver, Oliver cryptically asks Ruth, well, where do missing words go? Wouldn’t Ruth know as a writer? He then suggests that maybe the words will come back and lo and behold, after sleeping on it, Ruth finds to her surprise that the rest of the diary had been filled. It was clear that Ruth herself was writing the diary but is unable to remember doing so.

Ruth’s unreliable narration made for an intriguing read, as we see many other clues of her amnesia. After we learn from the diary that Nao was almost raped and later was recruited into prostitution at the maid cafe, Oliver says mildly that it’s nice that Nao made a new friend at the maid cafe, while Ruth is left confused and upset that Oliver isn’t more distressed by Nao’s struggles (which Oliver presumably already knew about from Ruth pre-memory loss). When Ruth says that it was “urgent” to help Nao, who was seemingly on the verge of committing suicide, Oliver looks at her strangely and reminds Ruth that the events in the diary took place over ten years ago, much to Ruth’s embarrassment. On a visit to her mother’s grave, Ruth remarks that other people were leaving a rose or stuffed animal, which perplexed her because who else would’ve known that her mother would have liked the stuffed toys? Ruth later theorizes that it might have been her mother’s friend who also lived on the island, not realizing that she herself was leaving them.

By the time I reached the epilogue, I understood why Ruth’s story was an important part of the book. Even though Ruth’s character arc was not as interesting as Nao’s story, the meta story of Ruth’s dementia and her writing of the memoir/Nao’s diary was a necessary part to bring forth Nao’s story. In the epilogue, we read a letter from Ruth/Nao to her future self, wondering where she is now and whether she is still writing, and the letter is signed “Ruth,” revealing explicitly for the first time that Ruth was in fact Nao all along.

Except that wasn’t it. At all.

After I finished the book, I went to go skim the Goodreads reviews to see what people thought about the major plot twist, where we find out that Ruth was the older version of Nao. And I couldn’t find a single review that mentioned this plot twist. I went to Google and only found an interview with the author, who merely mentioned her efforts to make the magical realism parts of the book (such as the pages of the diary disappearing) work. Magical realism?! I thought Ruth was an amnesiac. I asked ChatGPT, are Ruth and Nao the same person? ChatGPT said, no, they are distinct characters and your interpretation that Ruth was writing Nao’s diary is an “interesting take,” perhaps a “metaphorical” one.

This made no sense. Why wasn’t anyone talking about how Ruth and Nao are the same person? This was the big reveal that was explicitly stated at the end of the book… wasn’t it?

I went back to the book to read the letter in the epilogue again. “You wonder about me. I wonder about you… Wherever you are, I know you are writing. You couldn’t give that up. I can see you clutching your pen… In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that?… I really would like to meet you sometime. You’re my kind of time being, too. Yours, Ruth.” So if this wasn’t Nao as her teenage self writing to her older self (and signing the letter with her English name, “Ruth”), then it could only mean that Ruth was literally writing to another woman, the grown-up Nao, and wondering about her based on what she knew about Nao’s life from her diary.

I guess that is also plausible. I guess the big reveal in the epilogue… might not have been a reveal at all. I guess Ruth and Nao were not supposed to be the same person. I’d been so utterly convinced that Ruth was an older Nao suffering from memory loss, who “discovers” a diary written from the perspective of her young self that I had automatically assumed that the epilogue revealed that they were the same character. I’d even chastised myself for not realizing this earlier. But apparently, it was all a theory I had invented myself.

I was so amused by this turn of events that I decided to write this “book review” in hopes that other readers of the book might stumble upon this, especially other lost readers who had come to the same theory about Ruth and Nao being the same person.