Ruth Ozeki always wanted to be a writer, but it was her career as a documentarian that led back to prose. “When I tried to write long-form fiction in my earlier years, I never knew how to move a story quickly through time,” she says. “And it was only when I got into an editing room, and started editing film and video, that I started to understand how you did this.”

Speaking to the Straight from a Seattle hotel room, the internationally acclaimed novelist mentions missing the sensory aspects of audio-visual composition and thoroughly enjoying the making of a trailer for her latest book, A Tale for the Time Being (Viking Canada).

Long-form fiction supplies the platform here for Ozeki to present the metaphysical relationship between Nao Yasutani, a suicidal 16-year-old in Tokyo, and Ruth, a frustrated novelist who discovers the girl’s diary washed ashore on Cortes Island, B.C. Believing it to be debris from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Ruth is inspired to ascertain Nao’s fate and the provenance of the antique watch and cache of letters that were found with the diary in a Hello Kitty lunch box.

Binding the memoir and investigation together, like helixes of DNA, the author uses these strands to explore the nature of time and existence, morality under duress, and stifling rage. Drawing on elements as diverse as Buddhist philosophy, quantum physics, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, this volume captivates while reflecting on the interconnectedness of human experience and storytelling’s transcendent powers.

“It’s the book that I wanted to write,” Ozeki says, “but I wasn’t able to until after the earthquake and tsunami.”

She began the original draft in 2006, when a compelling narrative voice coalesced: “Hi! 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,” Ozeki writes. “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.”

“She was writing [the diary] to someone, but I didn’t know who,” the author says of this charming heroine. “And, actually, she didn’t know who she was writing it to, either.”

A pariah upon returning to Japan after many years in the United States, Nao is ceaselessly bullied by her classmates, and intends to take her life once she records the biography of her great grandmother, Jiko, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun whom she adores. The personal history that emerges, however, is her own chronicle of the alienation she feels in Japanese society and the resentment she harbours for her self-destructive father, Haruki, an unemployed computer scientist.

Though cultural dissonance serves as one of her primary themes, Ozeki, who is 57, remarks that all her novels, including 1998’s Kiriyama Prize–winning My Year of Meats and 2003’s All Over Creation, look at corruption and the synchronicity that ultimately links mankind.

Over five years and multiple iterations, she “auditioned several characters for the role of Nao’s reader”, yet remained unsatisfied. In early 2011, the author was about to deliver the manuscript when, on March 11, Japan was devastated by a 9.0-magnitude tremor that triggered a series of disastrous waves.

Riveted by the catastrophe, Ozeki concluded that her material had lost relevancy and the only answer “was to step in myself as Nao’s reader. And that would allow me to respond to the events in Japan in a way that felt real to me.” Retracting her submission, she drastically revised the text, now adopting a literary device she had previously dismissed as arbitrary.

Like the character that bears her name, the author resides on Cortes Island (“The apartment I have in New York is more like a satellite, and the mother ship is in B.C.”), and, conceptually, went searching for Nao’s outcome; nevertheless, she emphasizes that her own spiritual practice—Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist priest—provides a crucial difference between herself and Ruth, who is introduced to Zen meditation as a result of reading the diary.

Revealed through correspondences and another journal, penned by Nao’s great-uncle, is a subplot that examines the ethical dilemmas facing a kamikaze pilot during World War II. This ensemble approach to building dramatic momentum is among Ozeki’s stylistic signatures, a technique influenced by the films of Robert Altman, as well as the author’s Japanese and American heritage. “There’s no singular identity that I have,” she says. “And therefore I find it very difficult to tell stories that have singular points of view.”

It would seem that some motifs have fascinated her since childhood. Of the titles that have made a lasting impression, she cites Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time, “which is a book about time and time travel. And really, the forces of good and evil, and power imbalances,” Ozeki says, before laughing. “Oh, my God—I haven’t changed since I was six or seven years old. I am still the same person I was then.”