Ruth Ozeki
★★★★★
I've always been a big fan of magical realism in books so when I saw this on the shelf at my local thrift store for only $1 I snatched it immediately. I've never been in a rush to read books when online book communities are promoting them like crazy and I prefer to take my time until I can find a second hand copy, so I was late to the craze for this one and read it back in the beginning of 2024. I read a few books that year that I gave five stars but this was the first.
If you're coming here from my Earthsea review, this one is very different and the format that all the rest of my reviews will be in the future because that one was mostly pulled from an essay I wrote. ALL of my future reviews including this one include spoilers of the book and my thoughts on said spoiler-y story elements. You've been warned!
Before reading this book I would highly recommend checking the content warnings available on its Storygraph page, as this deals with very heavy themes.
The story follows Ruth, an author living off the coast of British Columbia, and Naoko/Nao, a teen girl who lived in Tokyo whose diary washes up on the shore where Ruth lives after a tsunami. The two stories are told in parallel and the chapters switch back and forth between them. As the book goes on with Ruth reading Nao's account of her, frankly pretty awful, life she becomes increasingly obsessed with the diary and protective of both the book and Nao, a girl who has no idea she exists and Ruth isn't completely sure is still alive. Something I found interesting while reading is that as Ruth become obsessed with the diary and struggled to slow down her reading, I noticed I was doing something similar. Everytime a Ruth chapter started I had to force myself not to skip it just to get back to Nao's story because I was becoming so invested in something hopefully going well for her for once. I was in college at the time of reading this and had to keep scheduling breaks from reading to do my course work, as opposed to reading as a break from the studying. But hey, to me that's a marker of a good book. If I get so obsessed with it I have to be forced to put it down to do anything else, then it's going to get five stars and permanently become part of my personal lore.
I think my favourite parts of the book were all the diary entries where we got to learn about Nao's extended family. The stories of her great-grandmother who is a Zen Buddhist nun and anarchist were so captivating to me. I wish that the story of her life that Ruth searches for later in the book was a real thing that I could read, I cannot get enough of that woman. The copied letters of her great uncle (? I read this a year ago and I'm stuck under a napping cat on my lap at the time of writing this, so I don't want to disturb her by getting up to double check that relation, sorry kitty comes first!) Haruki no. 1 of his time in the military and subsequent death which Nao believed to be an honorable death as a kamikaze pilot, but his letters reveal was an intentional suicide dropping straight into the ocean. Ozeki did such an incredible job bringing these characters to life that when I read about Haruki no. 1's death I felt remorse for his mother who had kept these letters hidden for so many years to protect his memory and standing in the military.
This is one of those books that's going to stick with me for a long time. Honestly it already has, I've thought about it at least once a month since I read it. I think it's one of those ones that you really should read if you're feeling lost in your 20's. It deals with a lot of out there metaphysical and philosophical concepts that I don't have the brainpower to unpack in a review, but boy did it make me rethink life while I read about them. If you have zero experience with metaphysics or quantum physics or anything similar this book might make your brain hurt a bit, but I promise it's worth it. Hopefully it isn't like when my parents put on a string theory documentary as part of my homeschooling as a kid and I could feel my tiny 10 year old brain slowly splitting in half and had a tiny 10 year old existential crisis.