“When the Transpacific Encounter Becomes a Contagious Fluke: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”

In Ruth Ozeki's 2013 novel, A Tale for the Time Being, the diary of Nao, a suicidal Japanese teen, along with some letters, a watch and a diary from WWII, survives its voyage across the Ocean and lands on an island off of the Pacific coast of Canada where it is found by Ruth, a Japanese American writer. By weaving together personal memoir and factual account, Japanese history and culture as well as a reflection on the wider networks of transnational capital, Ozeki writes a story that is “real and totally personal.” At the same time, the author questions the limits of the text blurring the lines between fiction and reality: in her novel Ozeki focuses on the process of writing and interpreting, the relationship between the author and the reader, their mutual recognition across time and culture and their ability to interact and influence each other's life. This essay argues that through her dialogue with multiple interwoven voices, Ozeki opens a symbolic harbor for anything to drift in, from current events like the tsunami of 2011 to ancient history and millennia of philosophical insight. “Reaching through time to touch each other,” Ruth elaborates a methodology to pace her reading on Nao's writing, her life on the girl's, at once sheltering Nao from the white people's scientific gaze and engaging with her own racial, gendered, and artistic subjectivity. I suggest that A Tale for the Time Being is structured according to Lacan's theory of “the four (or five) discourses”: while the white characters try to explain the blind spots about the diary and the story of Nao it contains, filling them with their own truths and thus producing discourses on the diary which objectify the subject, Ruth's reading of Nao's story is a mediating discourse, that is “the discourse of the analyst” according to which the relationship reveals to the subjects the true, excluded part of their being. In this case, the diary acts as Lacan's analyst which propels both Ruth's and Nao's agency and emancipatory subjectivity.