…in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. Nao was now and had this whole other meaning” (98 original emphasis). As Nao herself ruminates, “now always felt especially strange and unreal to me because it was me, at least the sound of it was. This coalescence of history and humanity is, of course, also encapsulated in Nao’s name, which is a homophone of the temporal adverb ‘now’. Instead, it resonates with the present in an intimate, personal and intensely human way.

Such semantic revision is by no means definitive though Ozeki’s tale isn’t a discourse for the present or for people.

And if you’re reading this, then maybe by now you’re wondering about me, too.Ĭleverly, Ozeki’s first lines initiate a knowing play of words: ‘the time being’ of the book’s title which at first seems to rely upon an idiomatic locative phrase to foreground the novel’s temporally-specific, yet perhaps transitory, relevance in fact turns out to be a noun phrase with ‘the time being’ acting as a reference to human life and its time bound nature. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.Ī time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one who is, or was, or ever will be. It does this from its opening aperture, by speaking directly to me or to you as its reader(s): Indeed, the novel appears to speak to the present, to what we might think of as the metamodern moment.

Reading Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, now in 2013, I find myself in no doubt that the book is exactly that – a tale for the time being.

A tale for the time being meaning