Ruth Ozeki’s wonderful, intricate novel encompasses both global catastrophe and tiny human potentialities. In a series of nested narratives she examines and interrogates the pact between reader and writer, probing the blurred boundaries between fiction, autobiography and what we understand as reality. At the heart of the book is the diary of a teenage Japanese girl called Naoko Yasutani – Nao – who is bullied at school and whose depressed father repeatedly attempts suicide. In a parallel narrative, we discover that Nao’s diary has been washed up on a beach in remote western Canada, possibly as a result of the tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and is being read by a Japanese-American novelist called Ruth.
In the diary, Nao intersperses her own unhappy home life with the stories of her great-grandmother, an ‘anarchist feminist Zen Buddhist novelist nun’ and her uncle, a kamikaze pilot in World War Two. As Ruth’s reading of the diary progresses, she begins to question those aspects of her life of which she had been most certain and also her professional life as a creator of fiction. To say more would be to tug at the threads that bind this splendid book together. It is enough to say that this is a novel of subtlety and delicacy which is, above all, a celebration of our shared humanity and an affirmation of the myriad possibilities we all carry within ourselves.
