Ruth OzekiCritiques

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Ruth, living on an island in Canada, discovers a diary (written by Nau who lives in Japan), letters from WWII, and a watch inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox on the beach. They presumably made the Pacific crossing from Japan’s massive tsunami. Ruth, who is half Japanese is able to read the diary but not the letters. The diary, though, leads her to believe Nau and her father are intent on committing suicide. Ruth illogically thinks she can save them when in reality, given the time for the diary to cross the ocean, the deeds are probably already done. Everything about this situation though is unusual and time isn’t what we think it is. This is a very dark book and there are so many trigger warnings, I made a list:
Sexual Assault
Suicide
Harm to animals
9-11 jumper
Kamikazi pilot who doesn’t want to die
Prostitution
Tsunami
Radiation
Bullying is the one of the worst, and it makes the reader want to bail. However, it is resolved in the end with a most unique ending I may have ever read. I wish this book weren’t so dark. It really felt like the author was trying to make it as horrific as possible. So I had to take quite a long time to think on it before writing a review. Because of the ending, I recommend it. But beware of the darkness before the light.½

Benny Oh is fourteen when he loses his father to a tragic accident. The trauma and grief that Benny suffers from, leads him to hearing voices from everyday objects. The voices become overwhelming and he finally takes refuge in a public library, where they can be silenced for a time. In the meantime, his mother suffers from her own grieving issues. I liked this fresh, interesting story. It is an oddball mix of fantasy and reality. The main drawback for me, is how frustrating these two main characters can be. The continuous bad choices they make got to be a bit tiresome. In the end, I still found it a worthy read.

Annabelle and her son Benny are thrown completely off course by the accidental death of husband and father Kenji. Annabelle works from home and Benny is a bit of an outcast at school; without a social support network things begin to fall apart. Annabelle’s grief manifests itself in hoarding behavior. In addition to demonstrating typical early adolescent behaviors like testing boundaries and creating emotional distance from his mom, Benny begins hearing voices from inanimate objects.

Ruth Ozeki introduces a number of colorful supporting characters, including a book that serves as narrator. This provides much-needed objectivity and emotional distance, as well as structure for Annabelle and Benny’s journey through grief and healing, which is anything but linear. I found both Annabelle and Benny annoying at times, but their flaws and idiosyncrasies are essential elements of the story. There were a couple of plot developments that I failed to connect with and didn’t add much to the story, but despite that I found the book hard to put down and zipped through it.

Family Values

Review Old Jiko style: Book is good. Book is bad. Same thing.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I loved the writing style and the mystery between Nao, Ruth and the Hello Kitty lunchbox. I adored Old Jiko and her words of wisdom. I was mostly interested in the stores of Haruki #1 and Haruki #2

It lost me a little bit towards the end with the quantum physics stuff and the receding ending to the story but I suppose the whole point was to make you consider the possibility of different worlds. I'm not sure that I believe!

Many readers may struggle with the focus on suicide, bullying and the dark side of Nao's life, but for me those sections helped provide necessary depth to the overall story. Those sections also made this a slow read for me....at times I had to force myself to go back because the story was sad and difficult for me even though I wanted to know what happened to our characters.

Overall I think it is well worth reading.

Loved this message-in-a-bottle book! Told in two voices across a span of years, hinting that time is nonlinear and characters live in the moment when they are read. The author is a Zen Buddhist priest addressing the concepts of time, the life-giving power of words, quantum mechanics, multiple universes, and life as seen thru the eyes of a Japanese teen.

A lovely, difficult book that will stay with me for a long time.

A Tale for the Time Being is a "You must change your life" kind of book. It's about time, death, consciousness, causality, and making meaning. It's also quirky and metafictional, but is nevertheless an accessible read, with likable characters and fairly linear storytelling.

Nao is a charming but depressed Japanese teenager dealing with brutal bullies, a suicidal father, and the aftershocks of family trauma from the Second World War. Nao keeps a diary that mysteriously ends up in the hands of Ruth, a fictionalized version of the author, who tries to track down Nao and reconstruct her life and fate. The novel dips its toe into the realms of speculative and surrealist fiction as it explores this relationship between reader and diarist.

A Tale for the Time Being feels like a catalog of strategies for responding to the impermanence and suffering of life: from suicide to making art to mindless Internet surfing to planting trees to the meditation practice of Nao's larger-than-life Buddhist nun great-grandmother. It's a book that goes deep, and at times it is an uncomfortable read. The forthright depictions of bullying, suicide, war, natural disaster, and sex work are never gratuitous, but they are graphic. That said, A Tale for the Time Being is absolutely a novel about hope. After Nao's spiral into darkness, subsequent moments of joy and rebirth feel earned.

If I didn't give this book five stars, it's only because it felt a little too linear, despite the meta, timey-wimey storytelling conceit. I wanted just a bit more ambiguity and weirdness, especially near the end.

Overall an excellent, profound read, and one that will hopefully inspire me to spend some time on my zafu this winter (I have a zafu and zabuton lovingly made by hippies in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so I truly have no excuse).

Have you ever had a book that seems to be calling to you from your nightstand or your book shelf? It sounds silly, but that is what this book has been doing to me. I would notice it there sometimes, and I would pick it up and look at it, and even open the pages, but I would put it back because I didn't think the time was right, or that I was in the right frame of mind to read it. Well I finally picked it up again, and this time decided to read it. It would turn out to be one of the last books that I would read this year, but it would be the best. I have read some fabulous books this year, so I don't say this lightly. Ruth Ozeki seemed to have written this book for me at this my time of life. It is a book that actually made me examine and reevaluate my life. It made me appreciate and be thankful for the life that i have had. It made me think about why things in the world have happened the way they have. When a barnacle-covered "Hello-Kitty" lunchbox washes up on shore on a remote island just off the coast of British Columbia, it changes Ruth's life. Ruth and her husband Oliver are living a survivalist lifestyle. Ruth is an author and Oliver a very talented botanist. When Ruth finds a diary in the lunchbox written in English by a young Japanese girl named Nao Yasutani, she does not realize how reading this diary will forever change her life, and change her thoughts about what has been and is still happening in the world. Reading Nao's story is heartbreaking, but it is also totally engaging. Ozeki does not spare her readers with coloured-over descriptions of horrific happenings. The descriptions are graphic and totally gripping, and they pull the reader in, kicking and screaming, to her fictional world. The book restored my faith in human nature, and made me realize that no matter how bad things may appear, faith, love, family and human compassion, can make things better, and change our beliefs and our opinions, and maybe even change the world a little too. This is a lot for one novel to accomplish, but this one does all of this, as well as tell a great story about a brave 16-year old Japanese girl. and a 30 something Canadian writer who meet through the pages of a diary.

What a beautiful novel. With so many things packed into it, I find myself somewhat at a loss for words, not knowing where to begin. Heartbreak, tragedy and suicide, school bullying and grooming, World War II and kamikaze pilots, Zen Buddhism and quantum physics.
I loved both Nao's and Ruth's voices. I would have liked to spend more time with Jiko (I think Nao's summer at the tiny monastery was my favourite part of the book.)
The author wove the magical realism into the book so skilfully, that I simply accepted it as part of that world. No need to suspend disbelief - there was no disbelief in the first place.

My Year of Meats reads like a dual memoir told by a young Japanese American filmmaker and a Japanese housewife. The filmmaker is working on a TV show about American housewives who cook beef for dinner-- to be aired in Japan. It's an amusing premise but it started off rough. It is Ozeki's first novel and read as such, but it improved about 1/3 way through and started to hang together and find its footing as the filmmaker made discoveries about meat production. I enjoyed the characters and the story was satisfying, if not entirely believable. **Some people won't read this afraid they will be grossed out by meat after reading. This is NOT The Jungle. It's more about drugs used in the meat industry that are now outlawed. There are some unsavory meat factory scenes but I had several steaks while reading this book.**

A contender for book of the year for me. Sci-fi bordering on magical realism slowly seeps into the book, until it explodes and creates a narrative as worth of manga as print.

Hands down one of the best fiction books I've read in a long time. The continuing theme of suicide might be hard for some but I found the book original, inspiring, and engrossing.

Seriously--go read this.

I was going to write some long, fancy, heart-felt review about the beauty and depth of this complicated novel to offer a little balance between the people who rave about it and the folks who hate it. But I realized that this book is also a time-being. And maybe in THIS world, it only really IMPACTS the reader or writer for whom it was written.

And that reader AND writer, for the time being, is me.

Pick it up and give it a cursory go. If it feels like you’re fighting a wave, put it back down. It’s not your time. If it feels like you’re falling into and of the story – then (and now), you’re it.

Prescript: I have decided to write reviews of books I read from now on, be as short as they may. Literary analysis isn't my stronghold, and it's harder to explicate what I don't like than what is pleasant about a work, but maybe giving my crude thoughts a more concrete form will help.

Review: I wanted it to be better than it really is, and it was pacing along splendidly well for the first 2 parts. The ending felt paced; and all that QM-Buddhist charade is frankly getting old by now. How many novels do we have to endure where the author, instead of carrying out a subtle and fulfilling denouement, relied on a faulty understanding of QM to resolve the plot? That pissed me off more than anything.

Other than that, the plot paces nicely for a large part, and the prose isn't bad either.

I think it's imperative to read Proust and Dēngo now.

Winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction 2022!

4.5⭐️

The Book of Form and Emptiness is an astonishingly beautiful novel written by Ruth Ozeki. At the heart of this novel are Benny Oh and his mother Annabelle who are reeling from the shock of Benny’s father’s untimely death in an accident. A young sensitive 12 year old boy , Benny starts hearing inanimate objects speaking to him with their voices cluttering his mind. His mother deals with her emotions by hoarding material possessions. Benny’s problems cause him to exhibit behavior that gets him into trouble at school and subsequently institutionalized more than once while Annabelle struggles with guilt, grief and loneliness while trying to hold her family together.

What sets this novel apart is the unique narrative shared by Benny and his Book (The Book) which is telling Benny’s story to help him recall details of his life and emerge from the shell he has wrapped himself in. As The Book tells Benny, “We have to be real, even if it hurts, and that’s your doing. That was your philosophical question, remember? What is real? Every book has a question at its heart, and that was yours. Once the question is asked, it’s our job to help you find the answer. So, yes, we’re your book, Benny, but this is your story. We can help you, but in the end, only you can live your life."

Themes of love, family, grief, substance abuse and mental health are touched upon with great compassion by the author. As the narrative progresses, the author paints a compelling portrait of how our interpersonal relationships are impacted by the importance we give to material belongings and the clutter we allow in our lives. Our inability to comprehend the “impermanence of form, and the empty nature of all things” often costs us our human connections.

The profound impact that books can have on our lives is a running theme in this novel and is eloquently expressed throughout the narrative.
“Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it’s every person’s task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.”

Adding to the depth of this novel are elements of magical realism and an interesting mix of characters such as the Zen Buddhist monk whose book on decluttering finds its way into Annabelle’s proximity, the European 'hobo’ Slavoj who befriends Benny in the library (the only place the voices are quiet and Benny finds some respite) and shares his wisdom and insight with him and a young teenage girl who calls herself The Aleph- ‘a gleaner, a freegan, an artist who worked with garbage’ who Benny meets while institutionalized.

The Book of Form and Emptiness is a complex, layered and lengthy novel that inspires pause and reflection. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and definitely recommend it.

Borrowed this from a friend back in March - it was an interesting read overall, but at times felt like a tourist's version of experiencing Japan. Half of the book is about Nao, who calls herself the "time being", a teenage girl who grew up in America, down on her luck in Japan and having to make money in the seedier parts of Akihabara - and the other half is about Ruth, a very literal author insert. Those parts felt like Ozeki wanted to write a memoir about her time living in British Columbia, but wasn't sure how to do it without fictionalizing it. That kind of thing doesn't always work, but I went with it, and I found it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction at times.

Through the conceit that Ruth finds Nao's diary washed up ashore and that the book is her reading them along with us, the story of both unfolds gradually. Perhaps too slowly for my liking. One annoying aspect was that Nao's chapters were written in her voice so much that they are liberally peppered with Japanese words, with footnotes to translate them into English (as if Ruth is presenting the words as-is and translating them for us) - very little was unfamiliar to me of course, and this is the part that made it feel like the tourist's version of Japan. Bilingual books are hard to do well.

There's also stuff about Zen Buddhism, and the book indulges in a bit of magical realism and time travel trickery towards the end. A good read overall, but I took a wee while to finish it off.

A time being - one who lives within the bounds of time.
What a ride, this slowly sweeps you in and moves you through the lives of two people, a young girl and a woman reading the girl's diary that was swept out to sea. There are so many serious topics involved here, suicide, bullying, sexual assault, that it does get pretty heavy. The writing is fantastic though, very clever, funny, and pleasant. I loved this, and will look for more by this author.

Basically a two timeline book with a teenage journal writer in 2001 Tokyo and her reader on a remote western Canadian island. Both are removed from places they thrived in and having difficulty moving ahead. The book takes a long time to really get going but somewhere about 2/3 of the way through it gets strangely and wonderfully entangling.

I came upon this in the New Books section of my library, where the title alone made me want to bring it home. This is the first Ozeki novel I read, and it did not disappoint.

I can't figure out why Ozeki wrote this. I've read 3 of her other books and loved them, but I could never get a handle on this one. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction last year and is highly regarded, but it created whiplash in this reader. It took forever for me to get into the atmosphere of it, and each time I did, it would take a quick 180-degree turn to some fresh disaster. I guess there's a movement now saying schizophrenia isn't a psychiatric illness, so she's bought into that. There's a large dollop of Marie Kondo with an overlying sauce of zen Budhism. You can say the characters are well-rounded in that you can see multiple sides to their characters, but the sides are pretty intense, all except for the mother who is just pitiful. I think ultimately I would have been just fine if I'd followed my first instincts and stopped reading after the first 50 pages.½

A Tale for the Time Being somehow manages to blend zen philosophy, quantum mechanics, ecology, suicide, and teenage angst into a very readable story.

Ozeki’s novel concerns the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl called Nao (pun on “now”) who has returned to Japan from the USA. She is bullied unmercifully, but her suicidal father and disengaged mother are unable to help. She records her story in a diary hidden inside a copy of Proust. The diary somehow ends up wrapped in a Hello Kitty bag with a WW2 watch and some letters, washed up on the shores of an island off British Columbia, where it is found by the struggling novelist Ruth.

Ruth feels a strong bond to Nao as she reads her story and obsesses with finding her to see if she is OK. This proves to be a whole lot more difficult than she expects, with none of the people or events described seeming to be traceable.

Ozeki plays with the concept of the "time being”, which seems to mean both a person existing in the here and now, and also the idea of time being fluid and mutable. It takes her a fair while to resolve all this, and I confess I lost patience with Ruth and her fellow islanders halfway through, wanting to return to the Japanese characters in the story, who are far more interesting. Which may indeed be part of Ozeki’s point - interconnectedness with other lives, other times, in fiction and in fact, can enrich our own experience.

Nao (pronounced 'now') is a 16 year old schoolgirl in Japan. She's recently moved back from the US where she had lived since she was little. She is cruelly and relentlessly bullied by her classmates, her father is suicidal, and her mother is too busy working. Her great-grandmother is a 104 year old buddhist nun and the only one with her shit together. Nao has decided to write a journal to a future stranger who will read it.

Ruth, a writer living on a remote Canadian island, is that stranger. She finds Nao's journal washed up on the shore and thus begins the relationship between writer and reader, present and past, truth and fiction. Alternating between Nao and Ruth, the story unfolds at a tranquil pace, uncovering myriad levels and layers along the way.

As I mentioned to the Badass Book Bitches in a message, I was just going along reading and noticing small, relatable things here and there. At about 25% in, though, I realised that this is basically a Zen Buddhist text!

So I looked up Ruth Ozeki and embarrassingly it was literally the first time I realised that "Ruth" has the same name, background, and profession as the writer herself. Please, don't judge me! Anyway, I wanted to see if she was a Buddhist and GUESS WHAT!... She's only just a damn Zen Buddhist Priest!! Well, I felt like an idiot for not knowing this.

I also recently looked for a meditation course near me and found a Buddhist sangha literally the next town over. The philosophies of Buddhism are ideas I've actually thought about for most of my life (but in a secular/science based way) and so I've signed up for an intro course. I just felt that it was kind of weird and serendipitous that I'm reading this book which I knew nothing about right before I start a course in Buddhism!

I don't have the words to describe how much this book affected me. Not only in an emotional sense, but it affected me in a profoundly complex and philosophical way. I found it soothing and hopeful despite some horrendously violent and painful moments. Best of all, it made me think. I couldn't have asked for anything more.

3.75/5½