![]() “Especially if you don’t have a lot of life left.” For a young person with death on her mind, she’s almost ebullient. “I think it’s important to have clearly defined goals in life, don’t you?” Nao asks with a teenager’s chatty assertiveness, cheerily confident that whoever finds the diary is exactly the person meant to read it. ![]() Nao confides, in purple ink under red covers, that she lives in Tokyo that she’s had a really crummy time in school, being quite hideously bullied by classmates who torment her for having spent her childhood in America that she loves her 104-year-old great-grandmother, a feisty Buddhist nun that she worries about her father, who, ashamed by his lack of employment, is prone to hapless suicide attempts and that she, too, is planning to kill herself. ![]() ![]() Nao’s lively voice, by turns breezy, petulant, funny, sad and teenage-girl wise, reaches the reader in the pages of her diary, which, as Ruth Ozeki begins to fold and pleat her intricate parable of a novel, washes ashore, safe in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, on a small Canadian island off the coast of British Columbia. The most tangible character in “A Tale for the Time Being” is a 16-year-old Japanese girl named Nao who never makes an appearance in the flesh. ![]()
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