I don't read a lot of fiction, mostly because contemporary fiction hardly ever grabs me. But I'd heard a lot of people rave about Ruth Ozeki''s A Tale for the Time Being, so I finally started reading it. And it really is a good read.
Ozeki is a Japanese-Canadian Soto Zen priest who practices with Zoketsu Norman Fischer, and the "time being" in the title is a reference to Uji, "being time," a fascicle of Dogen's Shobogenzo. But knowledge of Dogen is not a prerequisite for enjoying the novel.
In this novel, a Japanese-American novelist named Ruth finds a barnacle-encrusted freezer bag on the beach of an island near British Columbia. The freezer bag contains the diary of a 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl named Nao. Ruth reads the diary, and as she gets more and more wrapped up in the details of Nao's life she finds her perception of time, space and matter melting like spring snow.
The narrative switches back and forth from Nao's diary to Ruth's "now" life, and the intertwined stories pull the reader along like an ocean current. So, yeah, I was grabbed. If you like novels you can lose yourself in, this one does nicely.
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