底辺男子校・千鳥高校に通う紬 凛太郎と、お嬢様校・桔梗女子の和栗薫 子。付き合うことになった思い出の夏休みも終わりが近づき、凛太郎は 、薫子へ夏休みを頑張った“ご褒美”のケーキを渡す約束をする。こうして 夏休み最後のデートに待ち合わせた凛太郎だったが、思いもよらぬきっ かけで薫子の家にお邪魔することに…!?　そして薫子の母に、凛太郎が 伝える言葉とは───。

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.  Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.