A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.

Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

The purple words were mostly in English, with some Japanese characters scattered here and there, but her eye wasn’t really taking in their meaning as much as a felt sense, murky and emotional, of the writer’s presence. The fingers that had gripped the purple gel ink pen must have belonged to a girl, a teenager. Her handwriting, these loopy purple marks impressed onto the page, retained her moods and anxieties, and the moment Ruth laid eyes on the page, she knew without a doubt that the girl’s fingertips were pink and moist, and that she had bitten her nails down to the quick.

i wonder what u could tell from my handwriting

Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy. And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.

So when I got home that night, I googled Marcel Proust and learned that À la recherche du temps perdu means “In search of lost time.”

I think coincidences are cool, even if they don’t mean anything, and who knows? Maybe they do! I’m not saying everything happens for a reason. It was more just that it felt as if me and old Marcel were on the same wavelength.

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 you know she is telling you a joke.

But please don’t get me going on the topic of species extinction because it’s totally depressing, and I’ll have to commit suicide right this second.

me

This is a problem. The only reason I can think of for writing Jiko’s life story in this book is because I love her and want to remember her, but I’m not planning on sticking around for long, and I can’t remember her stories if I’m dead, right?

And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting,31 it kind of broke my heart.

If you ask me, it’s fantastically cool and beautiful. It’s like a message in a bottle, cast out onto the ocean of time and space. Totally personal, and real, too, right out of old Jiko’s and Marcel’s prewired world. It’s the opposite of a blog. It’s an antiblog, because it’s meant for only one special person, and that person is you. And if you’ve read this far, you probably understand what I mean. Do you understand? Do you feel special yet?

And then there was the anarchist feminist Zen Buddhist novelist nun.

my idol

Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.

“S o m e t i m e s u p . . .” she typed. Her wrists were bent like broken branches, and her fingers curled like crooked sticks, tapping out each letter on the keyboard. “S o m e t i m e s d o w n . . .” It was the answer to Nao’s elevator question.

It’s not really a huge fight, but we’re not talking to each other, which actually means that I’m not talking to him. He probably hasn’t even noticed because he’s pretty oblivious to other people’s feelings these days, and I don’t want to upset him by telling him, “Hey, Dad, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re having a fight, okay?” He’s got a lot on his mind and I don’t want to make him even more depressed.

all dads r the same

I’d much rather become a nun and go live with old Jiko at her temple on the mountain, but my mom and dad say I have to graduate from high school first. So right now, I’m a ronin, which is an old word for a samurai warrior who doesn’t have a master.

In Japan, they have special private catch-up schools for kikokushijo33 kids like me, who get behind in their schoolwork after spending a bunch of years at stupid American schools while their dads are on company assignments, and then have to catch up with their Japanese grade level when their dads get transferred back.

america is so dumb

Anyway, Jiko says that as long as you keep trying to be a good person and making an effort to change, then finally one day all the good stuff you do will cancel out all the bad stuff that you’ve done, and you can become enlightened and hop on that elevator and never come back—unless, as I said, you’re like Jiko and you’ve taken a vow not to ride on the elevator until everyone else gets on first. That’s the great thing about my great granny. You can really count on her. She might be a hundred and four and say some pretty wack things, but my old Jiko is totally dependable.

“This quantum behavior of superposed particles is described mathematically as a wave function. The paradox is that the particles exist in superposition only as long as no one is looking. The minute you observe the array of superposed particles to measure it, the wave function appears to collapse, and the particle exists in only one of its many possible locations, and only as a single particle.”

If there’s a dead-cat world and an alive-cat world, this has implications for the observer, too, because the observer exists within the quantum system. You can’t stand apart, so you split, like an amoeba. So now there’s a you who is observing the dead cat, and another you who is observing the alive cat. The cat was singular, and now they are plural. The observer was singular, and now you are plural. You can’t interact and talk to your other yous, or even know about your other existences in other worlds, because you can’t remember . . .”

the fuck

I don’t really like uncertainty. I’d much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.

18. 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 pointing to a source.” She also says, “It is impossible to feel angry when using this tense.”

first time i annotate explanations and definitions