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.