This paper builds on simultaneous calls for a critical health humanities that engages with the complexities and difficulties of imaginative literature and with structural injustice, rather than straightforward formulations of interpersonal empathy. I take Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013) as a case study for suggesting that attention to difficulty and disconnection in literary engagement is a critical methodology that can model and make visceral the challenges of empathy and structural consideration as processes that are deeply enmeshed in one another. Ozeki's novel depicts illness experience as a bodily state that is enfolded into the formulation of ethical responsiveness to both intimate and globally-connected others. The novel constructs these embodied processes as ones that fundamentally involve dislocation and incoherence. Embodied and ethical limitations beyond straightforward characterizations of pathology are thus also the ground for responding differently to intimate and global concerns both within and beyond the clinic.