A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

“Apparently they’ve become a huge problem in Japan. They’re very clever. They memorize the schedules for trash pickups and then wait for the housewives to put out the garbage so they can rip it open and steal what’s inside. They eat kittens and use wire coat hangers to make nests on utility poles, which short-circuit the lines and cause power outages. The Tokyo Electric Power Company says crows are responsible for hundreds of blackouts a year, including some major ones that even shut down the bullet trains. They have special crow patrols to hunt them down and dismantle their nests, but the crows outsmart them and build dummy nests. Children have to carry umbrellas to school to ward off attacks and protect themselves from droppings, and ladies have stopped wearing shiny clips in their hair.”

believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.

He only used the minds he didn’t like for folding, so we ended up with lots of insects made from Nietzsche and Hobbes.

Suicide is a very deep subject, but since you are interested, I will try to explain my thoughts to you. Throughout history, we Japanese have always appreciated suicide. For us it is a beautiful thing that gives meaning and shape and honor to our lives forever. It is a method to make our feeling of alive most real. For many thousands of years this is our tradition.

Because, you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience. Even although life is a thing that seems to have some kind of weight and shape, this is only an illusion. Our feeling of alive has no real edge or boundary. So we Japanese people say that our life sometimes feels unreal, just like a dream. Death is certain. Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind. So making a suicide is finding the edge of life. It stops life in time, so we can grasp what shape it is and feel it is real, at least for just a moment. It is trying to make some real solid thing from the flow of life that is always changing. Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Even Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life. Maybe you would like to ask me how does suicide make life feel real? Well, by cutting into illusions. By cutting into 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. Suicide feels like One Authentic Thing.

Suicide feels like Meaning of Life. Suicide feels like having the Last Word. Suicide feels like stopping Time Forever.

Recently there is a fad of suicide clubs as you may have heard. People can find each other on the Internet and chat about how to make a suicide. They can discuss some method and customize it as they like, for example what kind of music is suited for the soundtrack to their dying? Then, if they can find some friends they feel harmony with, they can make a plan. They will meet somewhere, for example at the train station or in front of a department store or on some park bench. Maybe they will carry something so they will know each other? Or maybe they will wear something special? Then they will text to each other until their eyes meet, and this is how they can recognize each other.

Now I think I must try to stay alive, but I have no confidence to do so.

Time interacts with attention in funny ways.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?

Jiko calls her cataracts kuuge which means “flowers of emptiness.”55 I think that’s beautiful.

If you’ve ever tried to keep a diary, then you’ll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction. It’s hopeless, really. Not that now is ever all that interesting. Now is usually just me, sitting in some dumpy maid café or on a stone bench at a temple on the way to school, moving a pen back and forth a hundred billion times across a page, trying to catch up with myself.

In Japan, some words have kotodama,56 which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power. The kotodama of now felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail that looked something like this: NOW felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. I was just a kid, and I thought if I could truly grasp the meaning of the big fish NOW, I would be able to save little fish Naoko, but the word always slipped away from me.

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. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I’d start making it shorter . . . now, ow, oh, o . . . until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too.

know this sounds pretty extreme, but in Japan it’s rather ordinary, and there’s even a name for it, which is zen-in shikato.58

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN

Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely.

Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

What if my dream isn’t sweet? What if it’s horrible? “Remind yourself it’s just a dream,” he said. “And then wake up.” But what if I can’t get back in time? “Then I’ll come and get you,” he said, turning out the light.

I need a supapawa.”

Soon the waves will quench this fire —my life—burning in the moonlight. Listen! Can you hear the voices calling from the bottom of the sea?

When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.

Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.

But Jiko won the all-around best hit of the evening with “Impossible Dream,” which is a song from an old Broadway musical.

I could really identify with the lyrics, and Jiko’s quivery old voice was beautiful to hear. She really put her heart into it, and I think maybe she sang it for me.

“No. Haruki never hated Americans. He hated war. He hated fascism. He hated the government and its bullying politics of imperialism and capitalism and exploitation. He hated the idea of killing people he could not hate.”

“He was poking fun at himself, you see. He was a kind boy, so gentle and wry. He was not the warrior type.”

She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.”

What would a soul sound like?

“I opened it just like you did,” she said. “And just like that, the paper fell out. I was so surprised! I read it and then I laughed and laughed. Ema and Suga were in the room with me. They thought I had gone crazy with grief, but they didn’t understand. My daughters were not writers. To a writer, this is so funny. To send a word, instead of a body! Haruki was a writer. He would have understood. If he had been there, he would have laughed, too, and for a moment that’s what it felt like, like he was there with me and we were laughing together.”

Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren’t tears. She wasn’t crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

The first was the kanji for sky. The second was the kanji for soldier. Sky soldier. That made sense. But the character for sky can also mean “empty.” Empty soldier.

Enchi Fumiko-san’s Words Like the Wind and the poems by Yosano-san in Tangled Hair.

Today during a test flight, I remembered Miyazawa Kenji’s wonderful tale about the Crow Wars. People think of it as a children’s tale, but it is so much more than that, and as I was soaring in formation at an altitude of two thousand meters, I recalled the Crow Captain lifting off from his honey locust tree, and taking to wing to do battle. I am Crow! I thought, ecstatically.

There are other words and other worlds, dear Mother. You have taught me that.

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.

Does falling scare you? I’ve never been afraid of heights. When I stand on the edge of a tall place I feel like I’m on the edge of time, peering into forever. The question What if . . . ? rises up in my mind, and it’s exciting because I know that in the next instant, in less time than it takes to snap my fingers, I could fly into eternity.

“Tadaima . . . ,” I called. Have I mentioned tadaima? Tadaima means “just now,” and it’s what

I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and hugged it when it has no more to offer.

They lay there, side by side, in silence. A few thousand moments passed.

“To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.”

Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.

Ittekimasu is what you say when you know you’re coming back. That’s literally what it means: I’m going and I’m coming back. When somebody says “Ittekimasu” to you, you’re supposed to answer “Itterashai,” which means: Yes, please go and come back.