Time

by Jill Mankoff ‘21

After finishing Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, I’m left with that powerful sense of discomfort that comes with closing a book and still having questions. It’s a good sense of discomfort. It feels good to think and to reflect and to want to know more but to be unable to.

I first encountered A Tale for the Time Being four or five years ago when I picked it for my summer reading during the summers between 10th and 11th grade. There were parts of the description that immediately drew me in. I tend towards books that emphasize isolation, nature, and cross-cultural connections with Japan. As someone interested in studying both Japanese and the environment, I’d also become invested in the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Over that period of my life, I couldn’t stop thinking of the great Pacific gyre that was surely bringing toxic radiation swirling closer and closer to me.

Yet when I read A Tale for the Time Being over that summer I was in that peculiar teenage phase in which one thinks hating things gives them a personality. I read the book with the intention of disliking it because I thought disliking a critically-acclaimed piece of literature somehow made me cool. It didn’t. Rather, I think I chose to dislike Ozeki’s book because it made me feel things deeply in a way that caused me discomfort at the time.

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Image courtesy of Amazon.

At 16, I was nearly the same age as Nao, one of the main characters of the novel. I felt her growing pains personally. I connected with her strange and twisting feelings about the gravity of her own life as she struggled, directionless. In high school, I often felt as though my life had been given to me to live. I hadn’t chosen to be born. Yet what Nao comes to understand over the course of the book—and I was unaware of at the time—is the difference between choosing to be alive and choosing to live. I was pained by her awkward process of self-discovery when I had not yet completed my own.

I begrudgingly finished the book the first time and wrote it off as a weird, uncomfortable, and incomplete tale. Yet both of my parents loved it, and they tend to have good taste. Despite my avowed hatred of the novel, the thought of it has come back to me time and time again over the years. The book’s striped jacket remains my favorite book cover. Just feeling the weight of it in my hands brings me a strange sense of power.

Eventually—partially because I had sensed a change within myself—I chose to read the book again. I would come into it with an open mind, I decided. I wanted to see what others appreciated so much in the novel.

And I loved it.

There’s something amazing about how a book changes for someone with time. I didn’t need to look at the footnotes where there was Japanese embedded in the text. The bits and bobs of quantum mechanics didn’t seem like nonsense to me. The story flowed with a strange gravity, reminding me over and over about the importance of living, the importance of one’s surroundings, the importance of respecting one’s elders while remaining an individual. I was enraptured by Ruth’s dream scene. It felt much like my own dreams, in the way it bounced through time and space, with an air of significance as well as the knowledge of irreality.

I think what this book left me with most is the sense that time will tell. That each of us will follow our own path in our own way and that we are unpredictable beings. I could choose to write one word but I could also choose to write another and both possibilities exist until I’ve chosen a word to write. Here is the word I choose: Good. This book was good. I feel good. I feel older and wiser and somehow younger and more ignorant.

And put simply, I’ve grown up.

Jill Mankoff ‘21 (jmankoff) encourages us all to take a chance and re-read something. From the Pandemic 2020 issue.

Featured photo courtesy of Mari Kramer ‘23.