A Tale For The Time Being

The story switches to the third-person point of view and begins following the character of Ruth, a Japanese-American novelist living on an island off the coast of Western Canada. While walking along the beach one day, Ruth spots “a scarred plastic freezer bag, encrusted with barnacles” (8) and decides to bring it home to throw away. At home, her husband, Oliver, opens the bag out of curiosity and discovers that it contains a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Inside the lunchbox they find a stack of letters written in Japanese, a notebook written in French, “a pudgy bound book with a faded red cover” (10), and an antique wristwatch. Ruth tries to make out the Japanese writing in the letters, but they are written in old-fashioned cursive that is difficult to decipher. At first glance, the bound book appears to be a copy of Marcel’s Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. When Ruth opens it up, however, she discovers that it is a diary, written in English “with some Japanese characters scattered here and there” (12). Ruth believes it to be the handwriting of a teenage girl and reads the first sentence: “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is?” (12). Oliver observes that the lunchbox may be flotsam from the wreckage caused by the recent tsunami in Northern Japan.

The story returns to the perspective of Nao, who is still writing in the French maid café. She begins by saying that she texted her Jiko, her great-grandmother, about where she should begin her story; Jiko replied: “You should start where you are” (15). Because of this, Nao begins with the French maid café. She explains that a few years ago, maid cafés—restaurants in Japan where servers roleplay as French maids and wait on customers as if they were 18th-century masters and mistresses—were all the rage in Tokyo, but now they have gone out of fashion and only remain popular with tourists.

Nao explains that the book she is writing in came from a boutique in Tokyo that sells novelty DIY items, including copies of classic books that have been “hacked” (21) and turned into diaries by removing the original pages and replacing them with blank ones. Nao chooses the diary that looks like a copy of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu because she believes it will fool her bullying classmates and keep them from stealing it. After writing in the book for the first time, she goes home and googles the title of the book and learns that it means “in search of lost time.” She is struck by how well the title of Proust’s book matches what she wants to write about since she is also interested in lost time. Nao explains that “the idea of the time being” originated in a book called Shōbōgenzō written by the ancient Zen master Dōgen Zenji around 800 years ago. The reason she’s decided to write about Jiko in her À la recherche du temps perdu diary is because “she is the only person [she] know who really understands time” (24). According to Nao, Jiko is “supercareful with her time” (24) and does everything very slowly and deliberately. Nao admires this quality in her great-grandmother, but it also upsets her because she knows that no matter how long Jiko takes to do things, she is still inevitably nearing the end of her life.

At first, Nao couldn’t think of a good reason to write down everything about Jiko’s life because she will soon be gone herself, and she doesn’t think she knows anyone who would really care about her stories. Suddenly, however, she comes up with a purpose for her book: “I will write down everything I know about Jiko’s life in Marcel’s book, and when I’m done, I’ll just leave it somewhere, and you will find it!” (26). She concludes the entry by observing that she is not sure how long her project will take her: “There are lots of blank pages, and Jiko’s got lots of stories, and I write pretty slow, but I’m going to work really hard, and probably by the time I’m done filling my last page, old Jiko will be dead, and it will be my time, too” (27).

Ruth has just finished reading the next section of Nao’s diary. Because she has been struggling to understand some of Nao’s colloquial phrases and references to Japanese pop culture, she has begun to use the Internet to decipher Nao’s language and annotate the text as she reads. She does a Google search for information about Jiko Yasutani, “the anarchist feminist Zen Buddhist novelist nun” (29), but cannot find anything. She also researches Dōgen, the ancient Zen master who wrote Shōbōgenzō, translated in English as The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, and the origins of the phrase “time being.” She learns that Dōgen had a complex notion of time that she finds “poetic but somewhat opaque”(30). Ruth worries about what happened to Nao and whether she did end up killing herself or if she died another way, such as in the tsunami. Looking at the cover of the diary, she thinks about her latest writing project, a memoir about her mother’s struggles with and death from Alzheimer’s. She has been working on the book for more than a decade and feels “a quickening flush of panic at the thought of all her own lost time, the confused mess she’d made of this draft, and the work that still needed to be done to sort it all out” (31).

That night, Ruth reads the first few entries in Nao’s diary aloud to Oliver while they are lying in bed. Oliver observes how fortunate it is that the lunchbox escaped the force of the Pacific Gyre and washed up on their shores instead of ending up in the Great Garbage Patches of the ocean. After Oliver falls asleep, Ruth resolves to read Nao’s diary at the same pace at which Nao wrote it so that she can “more closely replicate Nao’s experience” (38). After falling asleep, she has a dream about an elderly nun in a Buddhist temple who is typing a response to Nao’s questions about time and enlightenment. After writing her response, the nun goes outside into the garden and raises her arms to the sky.