Book Review: A Tale for the Time Being
Review by Michelle Welch
This is another Buddhist-related book that took me much too long to read. I remember seeing the professional reviews when it was published and being interested, but it wasn’t until Loretta at our sangha mentioned it to me again that I finally checked it out from my library. From that point on it was an edge-of-the-seat read.
The story of Nao, the Japanese teenager whose diary makes up the bulk of the book, is heartbreaking. Struggling with family shame and brutal bullying at her school, she finally finds solace in the wisdom and guidance of her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun. I have to wonder how Jiko’s lessons and zazen instructions would have struck me before I began practicing meditation; now I can appreciate how Nao relates to them. Similar to the path described in Dharma Punks, Nao’s experience with meditation is not a straight line. She continues to suffer, and act out in all her teenage fury, but she begins to find a new strength.
The story of Ruth, the struggling writer who finds and reads Nao’s diary, is much more subtle but even more relatable. Ruth engages in avoidance, not wanting to work on her new book or face the conflicts she has in her life and with her husband, and instead she becomes obsessed with the diary. She’s desperate to know what happened to Nao, whether the girl and her family survived Japan’s tsunami, and hunts for corroborating evidence to prove that the diary is describing true events. When scraps of that evidence are snatched away from Ruth, she suffers mightily. It takes her even longer than Nao to recognize the lessons of the wise elderly nun, but gradually they begin to influence her and bring her to a place of peace. There’s a confusing bit at the end of the book that could be quantum mechanics or could be magical realism; I’ve always been a fan of magical realism so that’s the take I’m sticking with, but perhaps it needs no explanation. The book remains a powerful lesson on how to live well – for the time being.
