Summary (incl. main characters, stakes, setting)
The novel is told from two perspectives—16 year old Nao in Tokyo, who has moved from California and is facing bullying at school and has a suicidal father, and Canadian writer Ruth living on an isolated island with her husband Oliver (supposed to be stand-in for the writer herself?) Ruth finds Nao’s diary along with some letters and a watch in a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore. She reads Nao’s diary at a “real time” pace and finds the story shifting, endings disappearing, etc.
Nao’s story follows her classmates’ bullying and ignoring, her father’s various suicide attempts, and most of all her relationship to her great grandmother and Buddhist nun Jiko who helps Nao find calm amidst the depression and despair. Eventually with Ruth’s help in dreams, Nao is believed to survived as a student in Montreal and her father successfully starts a business/tech venture inspired by Nao’s bullying experiences. Ruth finds peace at the island and with her husband for now, and relieves some of the stress of not working on her memoir project.
How I discovered it (rec, why now)
Read in 2018
How I felt (thoughts on writing, themes, plot, pacing)
Craft:
- Enjoyed appendix to explain esoteric concepts (Zen moments, quantum mechanics, Schrodinger’s cat) as told from Ruth’s POV
- Ruth’s character mainly as a reader and the role a reader plays in a story, as exposition—brief exploration of dissatisfaction and isolation
- voice of the narrator is strong and lots of fun
- Unabashed use of foreign words, with footnotes to explain
- Shishōsetsu, I-Novel
“has been cited…in reference to issues of truthfulness and fabrication, highlighting the tension between self-revelatory, self-concealing, and self-effacing acts.”
Themes
- Cultural difference in perception of suicide
- Zen buddhism concepts of life’s meaning and time
- Commentary on dangers and speeding up of technology
Who would like it
Introspective, spiritual people who want to contemplate time, life, and death
Top quotes
Making a suicide is finding the edge of life. It stops life in time, so we can grasp what shape it is and feel it is real, at least for a just a moment.
Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention?
This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. socialmedia
Knowledge and sense are not the same thing. Knowledge I understand, but how about sense? Is sense the same as feeling? Is conscience a fact that I can learn and know, or is it more like an emotion? Is it related to empathy? Is it different than shame? And why is it a compulsion ?
The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, to speak again.