The cover of Ruth Ozeki's book "A Tale For The Time Being," is pictured. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO

TORONTO - It feels like there's magic in Whaletown.

The verdant B.C. town is perched at the razor's edge of the coast and on the crossroads of history, on an island named after conquistador Hernan Cortes and along a channel that shares a name with explorer Meriwether Lewis. It sits across from Desolation Sound, with its ring of the literary; and like a dreamy blur, it eludes population censuses because it's unclear where the sleepy township ends and another place begins.

How else can you explain this western outpost's rich, remarkable literary tradition?

"It's fascinating to me how many writers there are on this island," says Whaletown author Ruth Ozeki. "Independent bookstores around the world are dying, but the only non-food store on this island is a bookstore, which is really funny."

Writers Dennison Smith and Shaena Lambert live there. Edward St. Aubyn, a British author who was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, visited the minute settlement not long ago. And that in itself is a dream-like portent, as Ozeki — who only became a Canadian citizen in 2005 — is now part of Whaletown's literary legacy thanks to the naming of her latest novel, "A Tale For The Time Being," to the long list of the $75,000 Booker Prize, which recognizes the top books from Commonwealth authors.

"For me, a big part of this (nomination) is an occasion to just feel very grateful to be Canadian now," says Ozeki, 57.

"Living near a place called Desolation Sound, where there's such a strong history of First Nations stories, and you really are barely clinging onto the side of the continent, and you spend 10 months of the year drenched in mist and rain — there really is a fairytale quality to life here."

The pages of "A Tale For The Time Being" are suffused with the dreaminess of her lush adopted home, as well as of her heritage. Ozeki was born to a Caucasian father and a Japanese mother, and she made stops in New York City, New Haven, Conn., and Tokyo while growing up.

"It's so confusing now ... certainly when I was growing up on the east coast of America, I thought of myself as Japanese because that's how the predominantly white culture perceived me," she says.

"It wasn't until I spent time in Japan as an adult, I suddenly realized that people around me in Japan were treating me as an American. It was a huge breakthrough, it was liberating, because I had been caught up in stereotypes about what being Asian meant."

It's the kind of uniquely cross-cultural exchange that could only have bred a book like hers, the spellbinding story of a woman who discovers a mysterious Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on a Whaletown beach and finds inside a disenfranchised 16-year-old's diary that draws the woman in and refuses to let go.

"I started writing it in 2006, and the idea of this Japanese schoolgirl living in Tokyo writing a secret diary and casting it out into the world, that's where it started," said Ozeki. She submitted a finished manuscript in early 2011 — just before the devastating earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 15,000 in Japan.

"Suddenly, it was very clear to me that I had been writing about Japan, but Japan is no longer the Japan I had been writing about," she said. "When an event of that catastrophic magnitude happens, it changes everything. It changes the way the world perceives Japan, it changes Japan itself.

"I found the book I had finished wasn't really relevant anymore."

So she withdrew the manuscript and gave it a rewrite. To help her along, she drew inspiration from the Zen writings of 12th-century Buddhist teacher Dogen Zenji, pored through the diaries of Second World War kamikaze pilots, and laced her sentences with Japanese cultural touchstones, from surrealist author Haruki Murakami to the fantastical manga films of Hayao Miyazaki.

"It felt very comfortable. It was always something I've wanted to do, and I didn't quite know how to do it before. So it felt a bit like a breakthrough to kind of tap into that kind of quality of imagination. It's playing with this sense of the boundaries of reality," says Ozeki.

And while the book handles complicated tropes that could have appeared cliched coming from a lesser pen — time travel, teenage angst, magic — she says that as an author, she found the material to be familiar and self-referential.

"Nothing in the book is that wild because fiction writing is time travel. Fiction writing is magical realism. You are inhabiting other worlds. And so if you're a fiction writer and you spend most of your waking hours living in imaginary worlds, then nothing I've described in the book seems that far-fetched."

Ozeki says it was "completely" the book she was meant to write. But while in many ways it is a distillation of the myriad cultures and experiences in which she's been steeped, and though she's thrilled to have received such critical acclaim for it, books for her reflect the Zen conceit of the time being — a monument to the moment.

"I would hope that any book that I write I was meant to write. And I think that if it gets written, that's probably true. ... And if it doesn't get written — and there are many books in my filing cabinet right now — it obviously wasn't meant to be, in that moment of time. Maybe it's just that their time hasn't come yet.

"I can honestly say that this is the best book I could have written at this moment. Hopefully that won't be the best book I write forever, but I do think I gave it my all."

The Man Booker Prize short list will be released on Sept. 10, with the winner to be named on Oct. 15.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2013