A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too, and that’s when the idea popped into my mind of using Marcel Proust’s important book to write down my old Jiko’s life.

The reason I decided to write about her in À la recherche du temps perdu is because she is the only person I know who really understands time.

I will write down everything I know about Jiko’s life in Marcel’s book, and when I’m done, I’ll just leave it somewhere, and you will find it!

How cool is that? It feels like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me!

Hey, answer me! Am I stuck inside of a garbage can, or not? Just kidding. Again.

laissez-faire

Hmm. I’m going to have to rethink this hacking concept. Maybe it’s not so cool after all.

She closed the diary and placed it on the desk as she stroked the cat’s forehead, but even after putting the book aside, she was aware of an odd and lingering sense of urgency to . . . what? To help the girl? To save her? Ridiculous.

colloquialisms. It had been years since Ruth had lived

in Japan, and while she still had a reasonable command of the spoken language, her vocabulary was out of date.

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.

What was she doing at that maid café in the first place? Fifi’s? It sounded like a brothel.

A pine tree is time, Dgen had written, and bamboo is time. Mountains are time. Oceans are time

If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated. Was the girl out there somewhere in all that water, her body decomposed by now, redistributed by the waves?

Unable to complete another novel, she had decided instead to write about the years she had spent taking care of her mother, who’d suffered from Alzheimer’s. Now, looking at the pile of pages, she felt a quickening flush of panic at the thought of all her own lost time, the confused mess she’d made of this draft, and the work that still needed to be done to sort it all out.

Ruth snapped the book shut and closed her eyes for good measure to keep herself from cheating and reading the final sentence, but the question lingered, floating like a retinal burn in the darkness of her mind: What happens in the end?

No one on the island called it by that name anymore, but Muriel was an old-timer and knew the reference. The old homestead, one of the most beautiful places on the island, had once belonged to a Japanese family, who were forced to sell when they were interned during the war.

Their marriage was like this, an axial alliance—her people interned, his firebombed in Stuttgart—a small accidental consequence of a war fought before either of them was born.

Muriel was a retired anthropologist, who studied middens. She knew a lot about garbage. She was also an avid beachcomber and was the person who’d found the severed foot. She prided herself on her finds: bone fish hooks and lures, flint spearheads and arrowheads, and an assortment of stone tools for pounding and cutting. Most were First Nations artifacts, but she also had a collection of old Japanese fishing floats that had detached from nets across the Pacific and washed up on the island’s shore.

They were beautiful, like escaped worlds.

“There are at least eight of them in the world’s oceans,” he said. “According to this book I’ve been reading, two of them, the Great Eastern Patch and Great Western Patch, are in the Turtle Gyre, and converge at the southern tip of Hawaii. The Great Eastern Patch is the size of Texas. The Great Western is even larger, half the size of the continental USA.”

That’s what would have happened to your freezer bag if it hadn’t escaped. Sucked up and becalmed, slowly eddying around. The plastic ground into particles for the fish and zooplankton to eat. The diary and letters disintegrating, unread. But instead it got washed up on the beach below Jap Ranch, where you could find it . . .” “What are you saying?” Ruth asked. “Nothing. Just that it’s amazing, is all.” “As in the-universe-provides kind of amazing?”

Rarely did she doubt a word, or pause to consider or replace it with another. There were only a few crossed-out lines and phrases, and this, too, filled Ruth with something like awe. It had been years since she’d approached the page with such certainty.

I am reaching through time to touch you.

I’m reaching forward through time to touch you . . . you’re reaching back to touch me.

She held the diary to her nose again and sniffed, identifying the smells one by one: the mustiness of an old book tickling her nostrils, the acrid tang of glue and paper, and then something else that she realized must be Nao, bitter like coffee beans and sweetly fruity like shampoo.

Nao had written her diary in real time, living her days, moment by moment. Perhaps if Ruth paced herself by slowing down and not reading faster than the girl had written, she could more closely replicate Nao’s experience.

It seemed like a very reasonable plan. Satisfied, Ruth groped for the book on the night table and slipped it under her pillow. The girl was right, she thought as she drifted off to sleep. It was real and totally personal.

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 . . .”

When up looks up, up is down. When down looks down, down is up. Not-one, not-two. Not same. Not different. Now do you see?

Timing is everything. Somewhere I read that men born between April and June are more likely to commit suicide than men born at other times of the year.

My dad was born in May, so maybe that explains it.

Not that he’s succeeded in killing himself yet. He hasn’t. But he’s still trying. It...

So right now, I’m a ronin, which is an old word for a samurai warrior who doesn’t have a master.

Obviously I’m not a samurai warrior, and nowadays ronin just means a dummy who screws up her entrance exams and has to take extra classes at cram school and study at home while she works up enough enthusiasm and self-confidence to take the test again.

pretty much how I feel, like a little wave person, floating around on the stormy sea of life.

I told him not to sweat it, because I already don’t give a rat’s ass what society thinks, and I don’t have enough potential to waste time worrying about.

My dad used to be in love with America. I’m not kidding. It was like America was his lover, and he loved her so much that I swear Mom was jealous.

So, everything was great and we were just cruising along, except for the fact that we were living in a total dreamland called the Dot-Com Bubble, and when it burst, Dad’s company went bankrupt, and he got sacked, and we lost our visas and had to come back to Japan, which totally sucked because not only did Dad not have a job, but he’d also taken a big percentage of his big fat salary in stock options so suddenly we didn’t have any savings either, and Tokyo’s not cheap.

Okay, so not a rich kid. An ex-rich kid.

It’s probably been a while since you were in junior high school, but if you can remember the poor loser foreign kid who entered your eighth-grade class halfway through the year, then maybe you will feel some sympathy for me.

I would probably already be dead if Jiko hadn’t taught me how to develop my superpower.

Canada is safe. My dad says that’s the difference between Canada and America. America is fast and sexy and dangerous and thrilling, and you can easily get burned, but Canada is safe, and my dad really wants me to be safe, which makes him sound like a pretty typical dad, which he would be if he had a job and didn’t keep trying to kill himself all the time.

The first time he tried was about a year ago.

It was truly a disgusting apartment, and all of our neighbors were bar hostesses who never sorted their recycling and ate take-out bento35 from 7-Eleven and came home drunk with their dates at five or six in the morning.

At first we thought it was tomcats in the alley, and sometimes it was tomcats in the alley, but mostly it was the hostesses, although you could never be certain because they sounded so much alike. Scary.

I read about how the scientists in the Arctic, or the Antarctic, or somewhere really cold, can drill way down and take ice core samples of the ancient atmosphere that are hundreds of thousands or even millions of years old.

After the temple, Dad would walk me to school and we’d talk about stuff. I don’t remember exactly what, and it didn’t matter. The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.

We were totally lying, but it was okay, and we walked the rest of the way not saying anything, because if we even opened our mouths after telling such big lies, the truth might come pouring out, so we had to keep our lips shut.

The minute he turned his back, they would start to move in. Have you ever seen those nature documentaries where they show a pack of wild hyenas moving in to kill a wildebeest or a baby gazelle?

Hyenas don’t kill their prey. They cripple them and then eat them alive.