A Tale For The Time Being

“Deliberately now, she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people’s business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.” 

When she first begins to read Nao’s diary, Ruth feels as if she is violating the author’s privacy. The narrator compares this feeling of reading a person’s private diary to the way a novelist is constantly observing other people to create their own worlds and characters. This comparison evokes the way in which the novel is concerned with the fluidity of the roles of reader and writer.

“Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne–‘I have been alive for a very long time, haven't I?’ Totally impossible to translate, but the nuance is something like: I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful. P. Arai calls it the ‘gratitude tense,’ and says the beauty of this grammatical construction is that ‘there is no finger pointed to a source.’

This is one of the footnotes in the sections narrated by Nao that Ruth writes as she is reading the diary. Ruth’s annotations in Nao’s diary are one way in which the novel indicates that the character of Ruth is reading the diary along with the readers. Here, her annotation explains Jiko’s cryptic response to Nao asking her how old she is. Ruth’s explanation of the phrase Jiko uses reveals that Jiko’s words reflect the gratitude to the universe that is so central to her Buddhist faith.

“You’ve probably noticed that [this book] doesn’t look like an ordinary schoolgirl’s pure diary with puffy marshmallow animals a shiny pink cover, and a heart shaped lock, and a little golden key. And when you first picked it up, you probably didn’t think, Oh, here’s a nice pure diary written by an interesting Japanese schoolgirl. Gee, I think I’ll read that! because when you picked it up you thought it was a philosophical masterpiece called À la recherche du temps perdu by the famous French author named Marcel Proust, and not an insignificant diary by a nobody named Nao Yasutani. So it just goes to show you that you can’t judge a book by its cover!” 

Nao is explaining that her diary has been made out of an old copy of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, concealing the fact that it is actually a schoolgirl’s diary. Although Nao doesn’t know who Proust is or the meaning of the French title when she buys the book, it turns out to have thematic significance for her and for the novel as a whole. Like Proust, Nao is writing autobiographically and is interested in memory and the concept of “lost time.” Furthermore, the choice of work turns out to foreshadow her later interest in French literature and culture, which she shares with her deceased great-uncle, Haruki #1.

“Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really, really slowly, even when she's just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she'll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so that you know she is telling you a joke.” 

Jiko’s approach to time reflects the Zen Buddhist belief that all tasks should be done with the utmost care and reflection and that you should take the time to be aware of what you are doing, no matter how simple the activity. This emphasis on mindfulness and the awareness of your surroundings in a certain moment is a key aspect of Zen Buddhism and a central part of the lessons that Jiko teaches Nao while she is staying with her at the temple.

“An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.” 

At the beginning of the novel, Ruth is struggling to finish her most recent book, a memoir about her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s. After she finds Nao’s diary, Ruth becomes determined to balance working on her own book with reading the captivating book that washed up on the beach. The personification of an “unfinished book” as something “feral” that needs “taming” anticipates the way in which Nao’s diary starts to become something that seems alive later in the novel, when the ending starts constantly changing.

“Maybe you would like to ask me how does suicide make life feel real? Well, by cutting into illusions. By cutting pixels and finding blood. By entering the cave of mind and walking into fire. By making shadows bleed. You can feel life completely by taking it away.” 

These lines come from Haruki #2’s letter to the professor at Stanford in which he describes the prevalence of suicide in contemporary Japanese culture. He says that suicide is appealing to men like himself because the pain of death would remove their shame and momentarily allow them to feel alive instead of merely listless and hopeless. Ruth comes across this letter, signed with the pseudonym “Harry,” after searching for Nao’s family on the Internet, and she immediately suspects that it was written by Nao’s father.

“But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then. 'Then' is the opposite of 'now.' So saying 'now' obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.” 

Nao explains that as a young girl, she became obsessed with the English word “now” because it sounds the same as her name. She finds the concept of “now” paradoxical because the present moment is impossible to capture in words or writing; in her diary, for example, as soon as she tries to describe the “now” it becomes the past.

“There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace when you’re floating around out there, all alone, talking to yourself.” 

When Nao first gets back to Tokyo, she tries to keep a blog so that she can stay in touch with her American classmates and keep them updated on her life Japan. After she realizes that no one is reading her blog, however, she feels even more alone and isolated because she realizes that she has only been talking to herself. Throughout the novel, cyberspace is represented as something that amplifies feelings of loneliness and depression by offering only the illusion of connection to others and catering to the darker side of human nature. Examples of this can be seen in the online suicide clubs Haruki #2 joins, the sadistic videos that Nao’s classmates post, and the auctioning-off of Nao’s underwear on a schoolgirl fetish site.

“Here’s a thought: If I were a Christian, you would be my God.” 

Throughout the novel, Nao frequently addresses the reader directly, speaking as if the reader were a friend or confidant. She goes on to say that her reader is like the God of Christianity because she can confide her problems in someone she trusts without facing direct confrontation.

“Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke. I don’t know how to translate it, but basically it means that we’re spaced out and careless because we don’t understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that.” 

Jiko is the only character in the novel who lived through World War II and remembers what Japan was like during that time. By including the story of Haruki #1 in World War II as part of Nao’s story and showing the parallels between his experiences and those of Nao and her dad, Ozeki explores the way in which the lives of present-day Japanese people are shaped by “the war and the past.”

“Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can’t ever lose, and I keep doing it because I like that feeling.” 

Zazen is the practice of Zen Buddhist meditation, which Jiko teaches to Nao while she stays with her at the temple. Nao likes the feeling of home that she gets from practicing zazen because she feels like doesn’t belong in either Japan or America, and her father’s struggles with suicidal thoughts have made her family’s house no longer feel like a home.

“A wave is born from the deep conditions of the ocean […] A person is born form the deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave. Until it's time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.” 

Jiko gives Nao this explanation after telling her that people and waves are not so different. The statement reflects Jiko’s belief in the interconnectedness of the universe and the way in which both living and non-living things come into existence and go out of existence in their own time. Because all things come and go like waves, Buddhists emphasize the importance of the present moment—the now.

“In my mind, I was becoming a superhero, like Jubei-Chan, the Samurai Girl, only I was Nattchan, the Super Nun, with abilities bestowed upon me by Lord Buddha that included battling the waves, even if I always lost, and being able to withstand astonishing amounts of pain and hardship.” 

Under Jiko’s guidance at the temple, Nao begins a regimen of intense exercise and focused practice of zazen to help her become more confident and resilient. Jiko tells Nao she is developing her “superpower” like a “superhero.” By strengthening her mind and body each day by learning to follow the key principles of Zen Buddhism, Nao starts to find the inner peace to put aside her anger over the torture she endures at the hands of her classmates.

“The first thing they taught us was how to kill ourselves.” 

The ghost of Nao’s great-uncle, Haruki #1, appears to her during Obon at the temple and speaks these words to her. He tells her that while he was in the Japanese Army during World War II, military officers taught them that they should choose to commit suicide rather than allow themselves to be defeated or made prisoner by enemy troops. Haruki #1’s experiences as a kamikaze pilot in World II become part of the way that novel explores the place of suicide and shame in Japanese culture. 

“‘Le mal de vivre, the pain of life. Qu'il faut bien vivre…that we must live with, or endure.' Vaille que vivre, this is difficult but it is something like 'we must live the life we have. We must soldier on.” 

Benoit LeBec is translating the lyrics of the French pop song that Nao sings to Haruki #1 when he appears to her as a ghost during Obon. Although Nao does not yet speak French, the lyrics of the song turn out to have significance for her as it is all about enduring the pain of life and making the best of the time we have on Earth, even if it can be difficult and painful.

“I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature—the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds—which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices.” 

Haruki #1 writes these lines in one of his official letters to his mother before he dies during a kamikaze mission. Haruki tells Jiko that he hopes she is still writing poetry and that he finds more comfort in literature than he ever has before now that he is about to die. “The idea of literature” that Haruki describes is one of the major themes of the novel. Writing and literature are often described as the opposite of suicide and death and as a striving for beauty, truth, and meaning in an often cruel and ugly world.

“It wasn’t that she’d forgotten, exactly. The problem was more a kind of slippage. When she was writing a novel, living deep inside a fictional world, the days got jumbled together, and entire weeks or months or even years would yield to the ebb and flow of the dream. Bills went unpaid, emails unanswered, calls unreturned. Fiction had its own time and logic. That was its power.” 

Ruth becomes so absorbed in reading Nao’s diary that she forgets that the events happening in the diary are not happening in real time; by the time Ruth is reading, ten years have passed, and Nao would be in her twenties. Ruth compares the immersive experience of reading the diary to the immersive experience of writing a novel; in both cases, the reader or writer becomes so absorbed in fictional worlds that real life is forgotten. The way in which Ruth begins to confuse her reality and Nao’s reflects the novel’s overall interest in the slippage between fiction and reality.

“I've always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide […] That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it." 

Ruth speaks these words to Oliver after he reminds her that the events that Nao describes happened ten years before Ruth began reading. Ruth says that she felt as if Nao would keep writing and thus keep herself alive as long Ruth kept reading. For her, writing has the capacity to make something immortal, therefore defeating death and in even time itself. 

“You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.” 

Oliver says these words to Ruth to comfort her after she gets upset about forgetting that the events in Nao’s diary happened over ten years ago. When Ruth asks Oliver if she is going crazy, he tells her that she needs to “be a little bit crazy” to have the kind of imagination that allows her to write good fiction. Her ability to “tap into” dreams and conjure fictional worlds is her “superpower,” and it’s this quality that makes her a good novelist.

“The blossoms in front of the station have mostly fallen, and the ones still clinging to the branches of the trees are an ugly shade of brown. There’s an old man in a blue-and-white jogging suit sweeping the petals from the sidewalk in front of his pickle shop. He knows I’m here but he doesn’t look at me. A dirty white dog is licking its balls across the street. An old farmer woman with a blue-and-white tenugui on her head is bicycling by. Nobody sees me. Maybe I’m invisible. I guess this is it. This is what now feels like.” 

Nao spends a terrible night with a client of Babette’s in a hotel and travels all the way to the north of Japan to see Jiko before she dies. Feeling utterly alone and invisible, Nao sits all night waiting for the bus up to the temple. After Ruth reads this section, the rest of the diary disappears, and these lines appear to be the conclusion of Nao’s diary. Ruth fears that Nao’s despair and hopelessness means that she ended up committing suicide instead of continuing to write in the diary. 

“Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life.” 

Oliver says these lines to Ruth after she realizes that the end of the diary has changed and that the writing no longer continues until the end of the book. He tells that the missing words may actually still be there and that it is her job as a writer to search for them. 

“‘For Now,’ she said to both of us. ‘For the time being.’” 

Jiko speaks these words to Nao and her dad after writing the Japanese kanji “to live” as her final poem. She realizes that both her grandson and her great-granddaughter are struggling with suicidal thoughts, and she wants to encourage them to embrace life and the present and let their existences take their natural course. The “now” and “the time being” are important concepts that recur throughout the novel. 

“She says the mark of new cool is no hits for your name. No hits is the mark of how deeply unfamous you are, because true freedom comes from being unknown.” 

These lines come from the email that Nao’s dad, Haruki #2, writes to his friend the professor at Stanford, informing him that he and his family are now doing much better and that he has developed a kind of encryption software that can erase a person’s identity across time and space. He invented this software to help Nao erase the horrifying videos that her classmates posted of her while she was being bullied at school. Here, he is explaining that his daughter now believes that the new way to be cool is have “no hits” for your name in Internet searches because it allows you to have more freedom to shape your own identity without being controlled by others’ perceptions of you.