Ruth And Nao's Life

In the novel “A Tale For The Time Being” by Ruth Ozeki, Ruth, a writer, finds a diary washed up by the sea. In the diary, 16-year-old Japanese girl Naoko Yasutani attempts to write about the story of her Zen Buddhist grandmother but soon gets distracted by her life events. Throughout the novel, Ruth Ozeki had created the character Ruth and Nao to make reading and writing a huge part of their lives that deeply affected them in many ways. Ruth reads the diary, she gets deeply drawn into Nao’s life that it affected her sense of reality her mental state of well-being but also sparked interest of zazen. Nao, on the other hand, had plan to write about Jiko making it her reason to continue living and her duty before she killed herself and Jiko died.

Nao states: “I will write down everything I know about Jiko’s life in Marcel’s book, and when I’m done, I’ll just leave it somewhere, and you will find it!”. In other words, writing deeply affected her life by it being of her great grandmother. Someone who she admired and hoped someone would find out about. This seems as something important to her, writing about her great-grandmother who was the only person that Nao really cared about and was important and interesting enough to write about. She decided to start writing about it because she knew she was going to kill herself and she owed it to Jiko to share her great life story, a memoir of someone she greatly saw as someone special to some special stranger. After a while, Nao had asked Jiko how she should start her diary and Jiko told her she should start from the present time and so she did. On two occasions, she speaks on how grateful she is to write to the person reading her diary even if it’s not a real person:”Anyway, I don’t really think you’re God or expect you to grant me wishes or anything. I just appreciate it that I can talk to you and you’re willing to listen. But I better hurry up or I’ll never catch up where I’m supposed to be” (137). Nao also emphasizes her appreciation again and states: “You may be only made -believe, but you are my true friend and you’ve helped me, I really mean that.” (385). This emphasizing the relationship she’s trying to make through her writing. It deeply affects her life because she keeps writing to the special stranger that’s still reading to that point of her saying that. As she is writing stories that’ll build up to catch up to where she is living at the moment. Writing in the diary has become something of importance for her, it has deeply affected her life. Not only was it helping her cope through