“My name is Nao and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.
A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me right now I am sitting in a French maid cafe 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. And if you are reading this, then maybe by now you’re wondering about me, too.”

And so begins a story about Nao who writes a journal somewhere in our past and Ruth who finds and reads Nao’s journal somewhere in our more recent past and we who read both their stories somewhere in our present, which will become our past and which is Nao’s and Ruth’s future. Assuming any of us exist, which I think we do. Do you?

In this novel, Nao is connected to Ruth as both are stranded in lives that they would not have chosen.

Nao is a teenager in Japan, bullied in school, lonely, missing her happy childhood in California and desperately worried about her suicidal father. Ruth is a middle-aged author on a remote island in Canada, with writer's block, missing her life in New York, worried that she is developing Alzheimer's, like her mother, and not quite connecting with her partner Oliver.

When Ruth finds Nao’s journal together with some other papers on the beach she feels compelled to read it in “real time”. That is following the timeline that Nao wrote it. Therefore, she reads only as much as Nao wrote in a single day. Meanwhile, she becomes desperately worried about Nao and her family. So Ruth begins to look for them over the internet and has the other documents she found translated from Japanese and French.

This story is an exploration of many things. It’s an exploration of the meaning of time and memory. It’s an exploration of what it means to read an other's words. It's an exploration of where writing comes from (Both the character Ruth is a writer and the writer of the novel is called Ruth). It's an exploration of what it is now. It's an exploration of what it means to die. It studies ancient Buddhist wisdom and more modernish quantum and multiple world theories.

Ultimately, this novel is about how we are connected to each other. Nao and Ruth stay connected throughout the novel by a variety of methods: the power of reading and writing to each other, using Nao’s 104 year old buddhist great grandmother's superpower, by Ruth's partner Oliver’s startling direct way of thinking and explaining things to Ruth and because of a crow from Japan now living on a remote Canadian island.

What is real and what is imagined will ultimately be left up to you as a reader to decide.

As one of my favourite books, I recommend this to everybody. However, it does deal a lot with suicide so there is a trigger warning for some people.


Postscript :

I "read" this on audible in 2015. The book was read by the author Ruth who states at the end of the Novel that she recommends reading this as both an audiobook and a physical book as both are different experiences. So this time I read it as a physical book. And she is right the physical and the audiobook is both the same thing and different.