A Tale for the Time Being

This book is an impeccable case for The Capsule. The co-protagonist, Ruth, a writer suffering from bouts of stunted creativity, is jolted like lightening upon finding a sealed lunchbox on the beach in British Columbia. And there was quite more than a sandwich in its contents….

The box (errr…capsule) contained stream of consciousness prose from a young girl in Tokyo, our other co-protagonist (and the undeniable star), Nao. But it wasn’t diary entries, no Nao’s almost delusional confidence shines because her writing was addressed to ‘you,’ the anonymous reader. There was no doubt in her mind that her words would be found.

Character wise, I defy anyone to speak ill of our second star, Nao’s great-grandmother, Jiko. The 104-year-old Zen Buddhist feminist-anarchist nun bestows serious philosophical concepts, Form is emptiness and emptiness is form, with a deadpan wit that actually makes you want to hear more. Even if the theories knot your mind and sense of reality.  

Structurally, once Ruth opened that lunchbox and started ingesting its contents, the novel blossomed like Pandora’s Box. There was interesting cadence, jumping from Ruth’s perspective, to Nao’s perspective, all the while maintaining a thread (this is no easy feat, and is notorious for impeding good writers who want to be great).

Tones and emotions were also unpredictable- seesawing us from the sometimes-gritty scenes of Tokyo to the mundane domestic scenes of married life across the Pacific Ocean. Not to mention the book dives deeply into the waters of Japan’s views on suicide, an alarmingly scary reality that is normalized in the country’s cultural milieu.

Kindly, the author grants us a framework to tie the book together. But a word of caution, this framework is not a solid one. It’s a fluid one, concocted of Zen Buddhism, magical realism, quantum physics, and dreams.  As they say, don’t grasp the grains of sand, this will help this novel envelope you. This is not your traditional, linear, controlled read experience. This challenge, especially during the last quarter of the book when quantum concepts like superposition, wave theory, and wave function collapse rendered me confused, and drove me to almost skim the pages just to reach the finale.

But alas, after some slow breathing, breaks into the appendices (very thorough by the way), I made it. Which metaphysically speaking did I really? Did any of this book really exist or was it only in my mind? If there is one piece of Buddhism I truly trust, it’s the impermanence of it all. If you let that concept underpin your encounter with this story, it just might make sense. It is certainly worth the try.