A Tale for the Time Being

I had just come back from a trip to Japan so I saw this in the library and was like hey, story about Japanese girl and I was instantly hooked.

Reading Nao's story was brilliant. It was interesting juxtaposition towards the initial thoughts I had of the country and the realism of her life tore me up. I also found the back and forth between Ruth and Nao's life interesting, but this interest soon turned into resentment.

At first, the Ruth sections were quite unique in the sense that it helped the readers piece together the puzzle of Nao and the mystery behind her life. I also found that Ruth's life, while boring, was quite unique. The characters living on the island, although not fleshed out very well, helped provide flavour to the semi-lacking social life of the island. I liked how Ruth had to visit different people as if a fetch quest waiting to advance to plot.

Although the Ruth sections got quite stale and boring, constantly getting in the way of the interesting life of Nao, (like seriously i dont care about a lost cat when this poor poor sad girl is bullied, traumatized, turned into a prostitute, and much more worse things) it was ok as it functioned as it's own sort of unique device for the reader. However, when the two characters actually crossed paths, it was not the way I wanted them to at all. The weird dream sequences and time traveling and parallel worlds were just so of putting. While reading I payed not much attention to it as I wanted to know desperately what happened to Nao. But thinking about it, this supernatural plot device made very little sense and was out of the blue for no reason. It is understandable that this is a fiction novel and I found the supernatural events within the Nao section to be forgivable. However, to base the entire ending on some supernatural experiences that Ruth had pulled me out of the realism of Nao's world and ruined the meta fiction this novel was, reverting it into normal fiction.

In the end I felt somewhat unsatisfied. We are given a fickle happy ending, one that is not fleshed out and somewhat ironically similar to the rushed ending given to us in Nao's Diary. Such a happy ending feels good as we are to assume everything that happened to poor sad sad Nao worked out in the end and she lives happily, but it is quite unconvincing.

But don't let these negative comments get to you, I found the book to be quite an enjoyable read in the end, and if I were to write about all the positives I would be writing forever.

Some of these things were:
- Nao sections never got boring
- the way Nao sections are written make it believable this is a 16 year olds diary
- Was a cruel and unforgiving story with very little hope written very well. (Only cringe moment was when she stood on the desk revealing her shaved head lol)
- 16 year old nao and 104 year old Jiko had interesting chemistry and juxtaposition
- learned about the good and bad of Japan
- Nao is very very well written and fleshed out. U can't not root for her