A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

“Each gyre orbits at its own speed,” he continued. “And the length of an orbit is called a tone. Isn’t that beautiful? Like the music of the spheres. The longest orbital period is thirteen years, which establishes the fundamental tone. The Turtle Gyre has a half tone of six and a half years. The Aleut Gyre, a quarter tone of three. The flotsam that rides the gyres is called drift. Drift that stays in the orbit of the gyre is considered to be part of the gyre memory. The rate of escape from the gyre determines the half-life of drift

The girl who makes these diaries is a superfamous crafter, who buys containerloads of old books from all over the world, and then neatly cuts out all the printed pages and puts in blank paper instead. She does it so authentically you don’t even notice the hack, and you almost think that the letters just slipped off the pages and fell to the floor like a pile of dead ants.

28 which means something like this: For the time being, Words scatter . . . Are they fallen leaves?

The way you write ronin is with the character for wave and the character for person, which is pretty much how I feel, like a little wave person, floating around on the stormy sea of life.

But mostly the whales still stay away from Whaletown, leaving only their name behind.

Dad started withdrawing from the world and turning into a hikikomori,

There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

In Japan, some words have kotodama,56 which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power.

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.

The kids at school were still pretending I was invisible, only now everyone in the whole ninth grade was doing it, not just my homeroom class. I 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.

He stared past Ruth’s head into some middle distance where French verse seemed to reside.

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.

I looked at the paper in my hand. There was one word written on it: 138