![]() ![]() “You don’t have to feel too sorry for old Marcel”. Seated at a table in a sketchy “French maid café,” Nao assuages her guilt over Proust’s missing words, sounding just like Holden Caulfield. Her purple scrawl fills the pages of a book that formerly contained a volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time - a craftsperson has replaced Proust's text with blank pages, leaving only the original cover. ![]() Raised in California and miserable in Tokyo, Nao cheekily addresses her imagined reader: 'Are you sunbathing on a beach in Phuket, or having your toenails buffed in Abu Dhabi?' We’re easily captivated by the 10-year-old English diary - with some Japanese words - written by a Tokyo teen named Naoko (”Nao”) Yasutani. Slipping and sliding in and out of time, her tale takes flight when a woman (coincidentally named Ruth) happens on 'a message in a bottle' as she walks the beach near her British Columbia home.Īttracted by a “tiny sparkle,” Ruth picks up a barnacle-encrusted package, containing a Hello Kitty lunchbox, a diary, a clutch of Japanese letters and a Kamikaze (“sky soldier”) watch. ![]() Ruth Ozeki folllows her much-admired My Year of Meats with a magical narrative, A Tale for the Time Being, that dances in all worlds at once. ![]()
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