Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) moves across two historical foci and two generic forms: the end of WWII in 1945 and The 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster; the bildungsroman and the I-novel. I argue that Ozeki’s dialectic of the Bildungsroman and I-novel is key to understanding how the novel rationalizes and historicizes Asian racial form under the material and geopolitical conditions of modernization theory. Combining archival analysis with a genre-oriented analysis of literary form, this thesis pursues a two-part investigation. First, it reads the Bildungsroman not aesthetically but historically, tracing the genre alongside the development of US modernization theory in Japan. Second, it examines Ozeki’s dialectic through an analysis of several characters in A Tale for the Time Being and the conditions of emergence that make their racial form legible.