Q2 Journal 2

The second time I sat down to read this quarter, I continued reading more of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.  Again, I read about fourteen pages within half an hour.  Ozeki resumes the story from Nao’s perspective and later switches back to Ruth’s.  I find the structure of this novel to be a major point of discussion because it could possibly give us, the readers, more of a feeling for Ozeki’s purpose (which I am still trying to figure out) that she tries to convey with this work.  From what I currently see, the sections alternate between Nao’s diary entries and Ruth’s reactions to them.  This gives me the feeling that I am reading Nao’s diary along with Ruth and registering similar responses.  It is also interesting that Ruth eventually begins to annotate the diary because of all of the Japanese cultural references because there are also many footnotes at the bottom of most pages of Nao’s section.  It is as if we have received the diary after Ruth has written her notes about Japanese allusions down, which certainly makes our lives easier because we will not have to look up a term two or three times per page. 

Now back to a little bit of what is going on with the plot.  The motif of time continues to show importance, as seen in Nao’s diary and in her description of her great-grandmother, Jiko.  Nao’s diary is what is known as a hack because it contains the cover of an old book, but its contents were replaced with stationery in which Nao writes her story.  This hack merges the past and present into one being.  Moreover, the cover is from a philosophical book written by Marcel Proust titled A la recherche du temps perdu, which means “In search of lost time.”  This raises the question from both Nao and the reader, “How do you search for lost time?”  It is highly doubtful that Ozeki used this work to be the cover of Nao’s diary as a mere coincidence.  Perhaps Nao will discover more about time and find an answer to the question.  She asks this question to Jiko, who, according to Nao, really understands time.  Jiko responds, “For the time being,/Words scatter. . ./Are they fallen leaves?”  This probably sounds more melodic in Japanese because the original version of this text forms a haiku.  With this, we and Nao think about how searching for time could in a way be like looking through fallen leaves.  Though Jiko apparently knows much about time, I find it ironic that she does not even know her exact age or her birthday.  Yet perhaps this means that time measured in numbers is irrelevant compared to the bigger picture of time itself as one perceives it.  Again, I enjoyed reading this part of the book, and I look forward to writing more about it later.

Q2 Journal 1

For the second quarter, I chose to read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki because Mrs. Healey said that the reading experience was entertaining yet still deserving of literary merit.  In about half an hour, I completed the first fourteen pages of the book, which is certainly not bad progress at all.  In this beginning, I noticed three major literary devices:  allusions, a change in point of view, and the motif of time.  The allusions generally come from Nao’s sections of the book, and they usually relate to Japanese culture.  For example, in just the first three pages, Ozeki includes mentions about otakus (obsessive fans or fanatics, often referring to computer geeks or nerds), keitais (cell phones), and hentais (perverts).  She likely leaves the Japanese terms for everything instead of translating them literally because the literal translations for most of the cultural allusions are bulky or lacking in power.  Without the Japanese words, the book would certainly feel more boring to me, and I would be less convinced of the book’s setting, which is at Akiba Electricity Town in Nao’s sections sometime around the present.  The second device, a change in point of view, is evident at the end of Nao’s first section of the book when all of a sudden the writing shifts from a first person point of view of sixteen-year-old Nao to the third person limited omniscient perspective of a married woman named Ruth.  Ruth’s section is set in the West Coast of the U.S. sometime after Nao had written her diary.  Ruth finds Nao’s diary in the beach covered with a Hello Kitty lunchbox and Ziploc plastic bags, and she would have thrown it away if her husband had not uncovered the diary before she had done so.  I am still not completely sure about what place Ruth’s story has in the novel so far, but I predict that it will have something to do with how we as readers know that someone will read and remember Nao’s story and that Nao’s hard work of writing about herself and her great-grandmother will not go to waste.  Lastly, Ozeki introduces time as an important motif right in the first long sentence of the novel when she writes in Nao’s perspective, “My name is Nao, and I am a time being.”  She continues this motif again when Nao thinks that she will soon “graduate from time” or, more accurately, “drop out of time.”  Time is very important to Nao because she does not have much of it left. From this language, I can also tell that Nao is seriously considering suicide, though she does not explicitly state that or her reasons for doing so.  Overall, I enjoyed this part of the book, and I look forward to reading more.