A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

She had read somewhere that watching kurage was beneficial to your health because it reduces stress levels, only the problem was that a lot of other housewives had read the same article, so it was always crowded in front of the tank, and the aquarium had to set out folding chairs, and you had to get there really early in order to get a good spot, all of which was very stressful.

I’m pretty sure she was having a nervous breakdown at the time,

Dad got all shy and gruff and took us out to eat sweet grilled eel on top of rice, which is my favorite dish in the whole world.

Dad got careless, and a couple of days before my fifteenth birthday, Mom found the stubs from the OTB in his pocket and confronted him, and instead of confessing he’d been lying, he went out and sat in a park, getting smashed on vending machine saké, and then he went to the train station and bought a platform ticket and jumped in front of the 12:37 Shinjuku-bound Chuo Rapid Express.

Luckily for him, the train had already started slowing down as it approached the station, and the conductor saw him wobbling on the edge of the platform and was able to slam on the emergency brakes in time.

Mom went to pick him up at the police station, brought him home in a cab,

Dad said I was old enough to know what kind of man my father was.

admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Instead of going to work as a chief programmer, he had been spending his days on a bench in Ueno Park, studying the racing form and feeding the crows. He had sold his old computer peripherals to raise some cash, which he used to bet on the horses. Occasionally he would win, and he would hold back some of the cash to bet again, and the rest he brought home to Mom, but recently he had been losing more than winning, until finally his cash was all gone.

he was sorry he had no money to buy me a present for my birthday. I’m pretty sure he was crying.

My old Jiko says that everything happens because of your karma, which is a kind of subtle energy that you cause by the stuff you do or say or even just think, which means you have to watch yourself and not think too many perverted thoughts or they’ll come back and bite you.

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.

He was an anomaly, a sport, a deviation from the mean. “Fries his fish in a different pan” was the way people sometimes described him on the island.

His observations, like those concerning the crow, were often the most interesting.

They’d met in the early 1990s at an artists’ colony in the Canadian Rockies, where he was leading a thematic residency called End of the Nation-State.

He was an environmental artist, doing public installations (botanical interventions into urban landscapes, he called them) on the fringes of the art establishment, and she was drawn to the unbridled and fertile anarchy of his thinking.

he would wait until the middle of the night, when no one else was using the telephone, to send daily dispatches with the subject line missives from the mossy margins.

he wrote to her about the island, describing how the berry bushes were laden with fruit, and where the most succulent oysters could be found, and the way the bioluminescence lit the lapping waves and filled the ocean with twinkling planktonic forms that mirrored the stars in the sky. He translated the vast, wild, Pacific Rim ecosystem into poetry and pixels, transmitting them all the way to her small monitor in Manhattan, where she waited, leaning into the screen, eagerly reading each word with her heart in her throat, because by then she was deeply in love.

“I’m just trading one island for another,” she told her New York friends. “How different could it be?”

It could, she learned, be very different. Whaletown was not really a town, per se, but rather a “locality,” defined by the province of British Columbia as “a named place or area, generally with a scattered population of 50 or less.”

It had once been a whaling station, from whence it derived its name, although whales were rarely seen in nearby waters anymore. Most of them had been hunted out back in 1869, when a Scotsman named James Dawson and his American partner, Abel Douglass, established the Whaletown station and started killing whales with a new and extremely efficient weapon called a bomb lance.

The bomb lance was a heavyweight shoulder rifle that fired a special harpoon, fitted with a bomb and time-delay fuse, which exploded inside the whale just seconds after penetrating its skin. By mid-September of that year, Dawson and Douglass had shipped more...

Whales are time beings. In May 2007, a fifty-ton bowhead whale, killed by Eskimo whalers off the Alaskan coast, was found to have a three-and-a-half-inch arrow-shaped projectile from a bomb lance embedded in the blubber on its neck.

Her own name, Ruth, had often functioned like an omen, casting a complex shadow forward across her life. The word ruth is derived from the Middle English rue, meaning remorse or regret.

Ruth was simply the name of an old family friend. But even so, Ruth often felt oppressed by the sense of her name, and not just in English.

In Japanese,

Ruth is either pronounced rutsu, meaning “roots,” or rusu, meaning “not at home” or “absent.”

On all sides, massive Douglas firs, red cedars, and bigleaf maples surrounded them, dwarfing everything human.

“We’re nothing,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We’re barely here at all.” “Yes,” Oliver said. “Isn’t it great? And they can live to be a thousand years old.”

When they first moved in, he was still quite ill, prone to dizzy spells and easily tired, but he started a daily regimen of walking and soon he was running the trails, and it seemed to Ruth as if the forest were healing him, as if he were absorbing its inexorable life force.

Their house was made of cedar from the forest. It was a whimsical two-story structure built by hippies in the 1970s, with a shake roof, deep eaves, and a sprawling front porch overlooking the small meadow and encircled by the tall trees.

Home-leaving is a Buddhist euphemism for leaving the secular world and entering the monastic path, which was pretty much the opposite of what Ruth was contemplating when she pondered her return to the city.

the 6,400,099,980 moments40 that constitute a single day.

His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will.

Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce benef...

Like Schrödinger’s cat, in the quantum thought experiment, he would have been both alive and dead. 41

When Dgen exhorts his young forest monks to continue, moment by moment, to summon their resolve and stay true to their commitment to enlightenment, what he means is simply this: Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!

The world inside the pages was as dim as a dream.

When she was little, she was always surprised to pick up a book in the morning, and open it, and find the letters aligned neatly in their places. Somehow she expected them to be all jumbled up, having fallen to the bottom when the covers were shut.

“I was reading about the Jungle Crows,” he said. “Apparently they’ve become a huge problem in Japan. They’re very clever. They memorize the schedules for trash pickups and then wait for the housewives to put out the garbage so they can rip it open and steal what’s inside.

“I am. I like crows. I like all birds. Do you remember those owl incidents in Stanley Park a couple of years ago? Those joggers that kept showing up in the emergency room with cuts on their heads, complaining about being swooped by owls? The doctors finally put it together.

Jiko Yasutani is my great-grandmother on my dad’s side, and she had three kids: a son named Haruki, and two daughters named Sugako and Ema. Here’s a family tree:

Haruki #1 was a kamikaze pilot, which is kind of weird when you think of it because before he became a suicide bomber he was a student of philosophy at Tokyo University, and my dad, Haruki #2, really likes philosophy and keeps trying to kill himself, so I guess you could say that suicide and philosophy run in the family, at least among the Harukis.

so that’s something else that runs in the family: an interest in French culture and getting picked on.

Emma Goldman was a famous anarchist lady a long time ago when Jiko was growing up, and Jiko thinks she was really great. Emma Goldman wrote an autobiography called Living My Life that Jiko is always trying to get me to read, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet because I’m too busy living my life or trying to figure out how not to.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my life, going from being a middle-class techno-yuppie’s kid in Sunnyvale, California, to an unemployed loser’s kid in Tokyo, Japan, it’s that a person can get used to anything.

I think she was afraid he might do something crazy like those fathers in America who shoot their children and wives with hunting rifles while they’re asleep in their bedrooms, then go down to the basement and blow their brains out, except that in Japan because of the strict gun-control laws, they usually do it with tubes and duct tape and charcoal briquettes in the family car.

there was this weight in my stomach like a big cold fish was dying just below my heart.

But at that moment I knew she was as crazy and unreliable as my father, and her question only proved it, which meant there was nobody left in my life I could count on to keep me safe.

I didn’t pray to Lord Buddha because back then I used to think he was like God, and I don’t believe in God, which isn’t surprising given the patheticness of the male authority figures in my life.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t force any sound to come out.