Nao finds comfort in writing in her diary, addressing an imagined reader and friend. Before she takes her own life, Nao is determined to document the life of her great-grandmother Jiko, a Buddhist nun who is more than one hundred years old. Unable to find hope for the future in her current circumstances, Nao is considering suicide when she first starts writing her diary at a French maid café in Akihabara. Nao's mother is constantly absent from the house, busy with her new job at a publishing firm, which she has taken up to compensate for her husband's unemployment. Her father, unable to find a job in Japan, falls into a state of depression – withdrawing from the world and going into a state of social seclusion, or hikikomori – and attempts suicide twice. Not only does she have to grapple with her own social struggles, Nao is also plagued by an unhappy family life. Her foreignness in Japan, as an American, leads to relentless bullying from her classmates. Identifying more as an American, Nao feels completely disconnected from her surroundings, and feels as if her 'life is unreal, and Sunnyvale, which was real, was a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space.' She struggles to assimilate in the new environment and experiences the disorientation of being viewed as 'the other' in the country of her ethnic heritage. Part of this discomfort derives from the fact that – unlike her parents, who identify as Japanese and speak the language fluently – she only speaks conversational Japanese and has a very limited knowledge of and exposure to Japanese culture. Nao identifies as an American and feels like 'an ordinary California girl adopted by Japanese parents', though she feels alienated in her new environment and finds it difficult to relate to the Japanese part of her identity. Nao, a second-generation Japanese American and native California girl, experiences the pain and discomfort of being uprooted from her home in Silicon Valley after her father loses his job, prompting her family to move back to Tokyo. A Tale for the Time Being is a metafictional novel by Ruth Ozeki narrated by two characters, a sixteen-year-old Japanese American girl living in Tokyo who keeps a diary, and a Japanese American writer living on an island off the coast of British Columbia who finds the diary of the young woman washed ashore some time after the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan.

A tale for the time being a novel