This is a book about life and death, war and peace, evil and moral, Buddhism and philosophy. It's about growing up and dying in peace. It's about disaster. It's about father, mother and daughter. It's about Japan, America and Canada. It's about time and goal. It's a 400 pages of two stories mixed into one that created the novel, "A Tale for The Time Being" and it is interesting and excited and kept me reading it for 3 long days. Toward the end, it gets complicated and many answers were left unanswered, but that doesn't matter much. Because since the very beginning, a diary came drifting to the shore of Canada soil is already a mystery. The book address many different aspects of life, and it is not limited to just a certain group of people, a worker, a father, a mother, a teenager, an adult, a Japanese, A Canadian, an American, a writer, a husband, a wife, a nun, a soldier. This book does not discriminate anyone.
Let me tell briefly about the plot. Naoko Yatsutani is a Japanese-American young fifteen years of age when she wrote her diary. Her life is a boat that is in the middle of the storm, faced with the bullying at school that get worse every passing days, her hopeless father had attempted suicide a few time. Being a victim of bullying, Videos of her "funeral" and rape scene was uploaded to the internet and her panties with the blood from her period, were auctioned online for the creeps that into schoolgirls. Then becoming a prostitute and becoming depressed which made her give up about everything, "I'm sorry my dear old Jiko. I love you, but I screwed up." (page 341).
So Ruth found Nao diary and became worried for Nao. As if she felt the connection between her and Nao, she started to search for clues about her. Towards the end, somehow, in her dream, Ruth crossed through the timeline to inform Nao's father and put Haruki#1's diary into the box. The words that weren't there before appeared on Nao's diary, and strangely enough, "And then, the next morning, when I checked the diary, she'd written a whole new entry about old Jiko's death and funeral," This event somehow remain me of Jiko's saying, "past and present, same thing.
