Story for a moment

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Story for a Moment (English original title: A Tale for the Time Being ) is a 2013 novel by the American Ruth Ozeki . As in her two previously published novels, key characters in the plot are Japanese and Americans, respectively, of Japanese ancestry: the main characters are a Japanese teenager who lived in California for most of her childhood, a Buddhist nun, and a writer whose mother is Japanese.

Ruth Ozeki herself is the daughter of an American and a Japanese woman and has lived part of her life in Japan. The first draft of the novel, which has a lot of autobiographical references, was already ready for printing when the Tōhoku earthquake devastated Japan in 2011 . Ozeki then withdrew the draft and revised it under the impact of this catastrophe. It is one of the earliest novels published in the Western world dealing with the earthquake and its aftermath.

History for a Moment was nominated for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013. In Great Britain he was awarded the Independent Bookseller Prize. The German translation by Tobias Schnettler was published by S. Fischer Verlag in spring 2014 .

action

The Japanese-American writer Ruth, who lives with her husband Oliver and her cat Pesto on an island on Desolation Sound , a sound on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia , finds a plastic bag with a Hello Kitty in it while walking on the beach -Lunchbox is located. In addition to old letters, it also contains the diary of the young Japanese girl Naoko Yasutani and a watch that - as it turns out in the course of the further action - is the watch of a kamikaze pilot. The diary is written in English - the girl grew up in Sunnyvale , California, where she lived with her parents until the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. When her father lost his job, she and her parents returned to a Japan that the girl called Nao hardly knew, whose educational system she does not find a place in and whose language she speaks insufficiently. Your diary is accordingly written in English. The family's fortune was also lost when their father lost their job and the three of them live in a tiny two-room apartment in one of the less attractive parts of Tokyo. Her neighbors are bar hostesses, whose sexual encounters in the Yasutanis' apartment cannot be ignored. They live on their mother's salary, who works as a publishing assistant, while Nao's father cannot find a job in Japan. He increasingly withdraws, folds origami insects out of the paper-thin book pages of philosophical works and tries several times unsuccessfully to take his own life. For Nao, acceptance of her new circumstances begins when she meets Jiko, her 104-year-old great-grandmother, who lives as a Buddhist nun in a small temple on the northeast coast of Japan. Nao writes about her in her diary:

“This diary tells the true life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko. She was already a nun and writer and new wife of the Taishō period . She was also an anarchist and a feminist with many lovers, men and women, but she was never perverted or mean. "

Nao spends a summer in this temple after failing an important school exam and during this time she learns from her great-grandmother zazen , a meditation technique of Zen Buddhism, which calm the body and mind and provides the basis for mystical experiences such as kenshō or Satori is supposed to prepare. In fact, one night during a temple festival, she met the ghost of her great-uncle, who lost his life as a kamikaze pilot towards the end of the Second World War.

Ruth, who has been struggling with a book project for more than a decade, begins reading Nao's diary. Their dispute is dominated by the question of how the bag with the diary and letters got to a stretch of British Columbia coast: Was it part of the garbage carpet that was washed into the sea by the tsunami of the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011 ? Or had Nao, who had been tortured physically and mentally by her Japanese classmates, taken her own life and carried the diary and letters with her. Like the watch, the letters, written in French, come from Nao's great-uncle. Towards the end of World War II he, who had been studying French and philosophy by then, became a member of the Imperial Navy Air Force special force that carried out suicide attacks against ships of the United States , Royal and Australian Navy during the final years of the war, in 1944 and 1945. The letters are addressed to his mother, in which he describes the merciless drill in this group. He chooses French so that the content remains hidden from a casual discoverer of the letters. The pension that his widowed mother will receive after his heroic death is supposed to save her and his sisters' lives. In one of his last letters, he confesses to her that he will not fly the suicide attack. He'll steer his plane into the waves. His mother becomes a Buddhist nun after his life.

Awards and nominations

Reviews

expenditure

  • A Tale for the Time Being . Novel. Canongate Books, 2013.
  • Story for a moment . translated by Tobias Schnettler. S. Fischer, 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-055220-4 .

Single receipts

  1. ^ Announcement from Fischerverlag , accessed on April 6, 2014.
  2. ↑ Ozeki: A Tale for the Time Being. On p. 5.
    in the footnotes, Oseki explains that "New Woman" refers to Japanese women in the early 20th century who rejected traditional gender roles.
    In the English original the quote is: This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Xasutani Jiko. She was a nun and a Novellist and New Woman of the Taisho era. She was also an Anarchist and a Feminist who had plenty of lovers, both Males and females, but she was never kinky or nasty.
  3. ^ Man Booker Prize 2013. Retrieved April 7, 2014 .
  4. ↑ Kirsten Reach: NBCC finalists announced. In: Melville House Publishing . January 14, 2014, accessed April 7, 2014 .
  5. ↑ Admin: Announcing the National Book Critics Awards Finalists for Publishing Year 2013. National Book Critics Circle, January 14, 2014, accessed April 7, 2014 .
  6. ^ Alison Flood: Ruth Ozeki beats Thomas Pynchon to the top Kitschie award. In: The Guardian . April 7, 2014, accessed February 14, 2014 .