A Tale for the Time Being- Book Review

For all you bookworms who's looking for a new book to read, this is a book that you have to have to read. I enjoyed this 85%, I laughed and cried together with it. I'm quite an easy cry-er though, but this is not a sob story so...rest assured. It is a book on life, death (oh lots of it), time, space, religion, philosophy, conscience and moral choices. There are also very interesting themes explored such as schoolgirl bullying, unemployed suicidal salary men, kamikaze pilots... which are all widely associated to Japan's culture. I love this book to no end. You have to read it. 

Here are some quotes that I picked out that struck a chord in me: 

(on blogging)

"It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart." - Nao, pg 27

"... the fact is that I just turned sixteen and I've accomplished nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. Do I sound pathetic? I don't mean to. I just want to be accurate. Maybe intend of graduate, I should say I'm going to drop out of time. Drop out. Time out. Exit my existence. I'm counting the moments..." -Nao, pg 7

"You can feel life completely by taking it away" - 'Harry', pg 88

"A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean," she said. "A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave." - Jiko, pg 194

(on Nao's grandmother)

"I was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can't hold on to water, still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away." 

-Nao, pg 195