A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

my coffee is Blue Mountain

Is Blue Mountain as expensive in Japan as it is here?? Ifvso, Nao gets a pretty big allowance!

I said that my dad had withdrawn from the world and become a hikikomori, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.

He had pretty much quit going online at all, and instead he spent his time reading books on Western philosophy and making insects out of origami, which, as you probably remember from your childhood, is the Japanese art of folding paper.

The whole philosophy thing started because Mom’s company used to publish this series of books called The Great Minds of Western Philosophy.

she brought home a remaindered set for Dad, thinking it might help him find the meaning of life, and besides, she got them for free. He started with Socrates and did approximately a philosopher per week. I don’t think it was helping him find the meaning of life, but at least it gave him a concrete goal, which counts for something. I believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as l...

the stuff Dad was folding wasn’t your typical cranes and boats and party hats and candy dishes. The stuff he folded was origami on steroids, totally wack and beautiful. Actually, he liked to fold the pages from The Great Minds of Western Philosophy, and after he finished reading them he would cut them out of the book with a box cutter and a steel-edged ruler. As you probably know, there are a lot of great minds in Western philosophy, and the books were printed on superthin paper so they could cram more minds into the series. Dad says thin paper is easier to fold, especially if you’re making something complicated like a Trypoxylus dichotomus, which is a Japanese rhinoceros beetle, or a Mantis religiosa, which is a praying mantis. He only used the minds he didn’t like for folding, so we ended up with lots of insects made from Nietzsche and Hobbes.

😅

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

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.

Time literally gets away from us. We are unable to pin it down.

in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then.

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.

For me to even offer was a big deal. My dad doesn’t like to go outside even though the cigarette vending machine is only a couple of blocks away, but normally I refuse to go buy cigarettes for him because of all the ways you can commit suicide, smoking has to be the stupidest and also the most expensive.

So true!

I ran down the alleyway and ducked behind the row of vending machines that sell cigarettes and porno magazines and energy drinks.

I've heard that in Japan, one can buy just avout anything from a vending machine.

The only part I remember goes like this: Shiki fu i ku, ku fu i shiki.70

"Form is emptiness and emptiness is form."

It’s pretty abstract. Old Jiko tried to explain it to me, and I don’t know if I understood it correctly or not, but I think it means that nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things—including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you—are just kind of flowing through for the time being. I think that’s true, and it’s very reassuring, and I just wish I’d understood that at my funeral when Ugawa Sensei was chanting because it would have been a great comfort to me, but of course I didn’t because these sutras are in an old-fashioned language that nobody understands anymore, unless you’re like Jiko and it’s your job. But actually it doesn’t really matter because even if you can’t exactly understand the words, you know they are beautiful and profound, and Ugawa Sensei ’s voice, which was usually so mumbly and unpleasant, was suddenly soft and sad and gentle, and he was chanting with feeling, like he really meant it. When he walked up to my desk to offer me a flower, the look on his face made me want to cry because it was so twisted up and full of his own particular sorrow.

I just lay there, perfectly still. It was pointless to struggle or scream. There were too many of them, and no one would hear me or come to help, but really it didn’t matter, because I was thinking about Number One, and he was giving me courage. They could break my body but they wouldn’t break my spirit. They were only shadows, and as I listened to them arguing, I felt my face relax into a gentle smile. I summoned up my supapawa, and soon the shadows were just mosquitoes, buzzing in the distance and bothersome only if you let them be.