What were you doing during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan?
While reading “A Tale for the Time Being” by author Ruth Ozeki, I recalled sitting in the newsroom, staring at the telly screen in aghast while monitoring Japan’s national public broadcasting station NHK for the latest footages. These images of monstrous tsunami waves sweeping cars, houses and everything along its way is etched indelibly in my mind.
With this disaster as the backdrop, Ozeki wrote this brilliant novel that has far exceeded my expectations, and is easily one of my favorite books for this year.
For starters, the introduction to the story is already a seller. A Hello Kitty lunch box was picked up along the seashore by Ruth, a writer living with her husband Oliver on an isolated island in Canada. In the lunch box, it contained a diary written by a Japanese teenage girl…
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Amy Keeley 