A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

This is a very nicely written book that utilizes two voices to tell the story of Japanese culture from the time of Hirohito up to the present.

Ruth is a novelist who lives on the West Coast of British Columbia, and she is adjusting to having gone from East Coast city living to being in a desolate small town (it seems like it might be a story that the author herself could relate to).  She finds a box that contains a diary of a young Japanese girl--it is not clear if the diary has been swept there after the tsunami that struck Japan or not--it seems too soon for that, but as Ruth reads the diary she wonders about the writer.

Nao is the diary's author--she is a teen who has Japanese parents but has largely grown up in California--her father loses his job and they have to return to Japan, where she becomes acquainted with two quintessential aspects of what it is to be Japanese--you mustn't be different and when the culture is a shame culture, the bullying is brutal.  So as Ruth reads the diary she becomes increasingly worried about Nao--what happened to her?  We share Ruth's concern.  Nao is being physically abused and harshly humiliated by her peers.  Her father is depsondent and suicidal.  She has discovered that he uncle, a kamikaze pilot during WWII, committed suicide rather than kill people because of his opposition to the war.  The bad news for Nao just keeps coming.

This is a fantastic book--it makes you think, it has introspective qualities, it is well paced, and it is unusual.  The author is a Zen Buddist priest and an independent film maker in addition to being an author--while I don't know what those qualities bring to her writing specifically, she has a great voice.