A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.

I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future.

Actually, it doesn’t matter very much, because by the time you read this, everything will be different, and you will be nowhere in particular, flipping idly through the pages of this book, which happens to be the diary of my last days on earth, wondering if you should keep on reading.

Ugh. That was dumb. I’ll have to do better. I bet you’re wondering what kind of stupid girl would write words like that.

Naoko Yasutani, which is my full name, but you can call me Nao because everyone else does.

Babette is my maid and also my new friend, and my coffee is Blue Mountain and I drink it black,

She has a maid, so she is a rich girl which I am already disinterested. If she has a maid; what problems could she possibly have besides the trivial?

I have tucked my shoulder-length hair behind my right ear, which is pierced with five holes, but now I’m letting it fall modestly across my face again because the otaku4 salaryman who’s sitting at the table next to me is staring, and it’s creeping me out even though I find it amusing, too.

Everything changes, and anything is possible, so maybe I’ll change my mind about him, too. Maybe in the next few minutes, he will lean awkwardly in my direction and say something surprisingly beautiful to me, and I will be overcome with a fondness for him in spite of his greasy hair and bad complexion, and I’ll actually condescend to converse with him a little bit, and eventually he will invite me to go shopping, and if he can convince me that he’s madly in love with me, I’ll go to a department store with him and let him buy me a cute cardigan sweater or a keitai5 or handbag, even though he obviously doesn’t have a lot of money.

I already don't like this girl; she values possessions above all else and what people can give her.

he’ll tie me up and put the plastic shopping bag from my new cardigan over my head and rape me, and hours later the police will find my lifeless naked body bent at odd angles on the floor, next to the big round zebra-skin bed.

Okay, this girl has issues.

I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.

Too late for that 😑

I’m not a nasty girl or a hentai,6

This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko.

She was also an anarchist and a feminist who had plenty of lovers, both males and females, but she was never kinky or nasty.

I just turned sixteen and I’ve accomplished nothing at all. Zilch. Nada.

Do I sound pathetic?

Inside the bag, she could see a hint of something red, someone’s garbage, no doubt, tossed overboard or left behind after a picnic or a rave.

A few years earlier it was severed feet.

Vancouver Island, washed up on the sand. One had been found on this very beach. No one could explain what had happened to the rest of the bodies.

Their freezer was filled with plastic shrouds containing the tiny carcasses of birds, shrews, and other small animals that their cat had brought in, waiting to be dissected and stuffed.

The cat had a name, Schrödinger,

They were a team, Oliver and the cat. When Oliver went upstairs, the cat went upstairs. When Oliver came downstairs to eat, the cat came downstairs to eat. When Oliver went outside to pee, the cat went outside to pee.

sorted the contents into three neat collections: a small stack of handwritten letters; a pudgy bound book with a faded red cover; a sturdy antique wristwatch with a matte black face and a luminous dial. Next to these sat the Hello Kitty lunchbox that had protected the contents from the corrosive effects of the sea.

They liked books, all books, but especially old ones, and their house was overflowing with them. There were books everywhere, stacked on shelves and piled on the floor, on chairs, on the stairway treads, but neither Ruth nor Oliver minded.

Ruth was a novelist,

In addition to the extensive and dog-eared juvenile literature section and some popular adult titles, the library’s collection seemed largely to comprise books on gardening, canning, food security, alternative energy, alternative healing, and alternative schooling. Ruth missed the abundance and diversity of urban libraries, their quiet spaciousness, and when she and Oliver moved to the small island, they agreed that she should be able to order any book she wanted, which she did. Research, she called it, although in the end he’d read most of them, while she’d read only a few.

“In search of lost time,” she said, translating the tarnished gilt title, embossed on the red cloth spine. “I’ve never read it.”

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 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.

like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people’s business.

“Flotsam is accidental, stuff found floating at sea. Jetsam’s been jettisoned.

“What’s a gyre?”

“There are eleven great planetary gyres,” he said. “Two of them flow directly toward us from Japan and diverge just off the BC coastline. The smaller one, the Aleut Gyre, goes north toward the Aleutian Islands. The larger one goes south. It’s sometimes called the Turtle Gyre, because the sea turtles ride it when they migrate from Japan to Baja.”

“Gyres are bigger. Like a string of currents. Imagine a ring of snakes, each biting the tail of the one ahead of it.

Okay, my dear old Jiko. I’ll start right here at Fifi’s Lovely Apron. Fifi’s is one of a bunch of maid cafés that popped up all over Akiba Electricity Town11

The interior is decorated mostly in pink and red, with accents of gold and ebony and ivory.

The feeling at Fifi’s Lovely Apron is very chic and intimate, like being stuffed inside a great big claustrophobic valentine, and the maids, with their pushed-up breasts and frilly uniforms, look like cute little valentines, too.

Mimi knelt down before him to feed him, blowing on each bite before spooning it into his mouth.

The husband is trying to get his wife to let him order a Hello Kitty omurice, too, but she’s way too uptight.

I get my coffee for free because Babette is my friend.

I find it relaxing exactly because nobody’s trying too hard.

But she understands that shit happens, and she just sits there and listens and nods her head and counts the beads on her juzu,20 saying blessings for those poor high school girls and the perverts and all the beings who are suffering in the world.

I think the main reason she’s still alive is because of all the stuff I give her to pray about.

“But Granny, it’s going to take forever!” “Well, we must try even harder, then.” “We?!” “Of course, dear Nao. You must help me.” “No way!” I told Granny. “Forget it! I’m no fucking bosatsu . . .” But she just smacked her lips and clicked her juzu beads, and the way she looked at me through those thick black-framed glasses of hers, I think maybe she was saying a blessing for me just then, too.

Okay, so now I really am going to tell you about the fascinating life of Yasutani Jiko, the famous anarchist-feminist-novelist-turned-Buddhist-nun of the Taisho era,

Recently some nasty stuff has been happening in my life, and the day I bought the diary, I was skipping school and feeling especially blue, so I decided to go shopping in Harajuku to cheer myself up.

French is cool and has a sophisticated feeling, and besides, this book is exactly the right size to fit into my handbag.

And what if now the ghost was preventing me from using his famous book to write about typical dumb schoolgirl stuff, like my crushes on boys (not that I have any), or new fashions I want (my desires are endless), or my fat thighs (actually my thighs are fine, it’s my knees I hate). You really can’t blame old Marcel’s ghost for getting righteously pissed off, thinking I might be dumb enough to write this kind of stupid crap inside his important book.

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.

À la recherche du temps perdu means “In search of lost time.”

How do you search for lost time, anyway?