A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

I could see the excitement in his face when he called out my name and pretended to wait. I could see it in the way he looked at me, and then looked through me, so convincingly I could almost believe I wasn’t there.

I hope you understand that I don’t think he was a bad man. I just think he was very insecure and could convince himself of anything, the way insecure people can. Like my dad, for example, who can convince himself that his suicide will not harm me or my mom because actually we’ll be better off without him, and at some point in the not-so-distant future we’ll realize this and thank him for killing himself. Same with Ugawa Sensei , who probably figured that I, too, would be happier just not being there, and he was actually right about that. In a way, he was just helping me to achieve my goal, and as a result, I could almost feel grateful.

after school I walked back to our apartment, usually more or less alone, which was a whole lot better than being chased and tripped and shoved against vending machines or into bicycle racks filled with bicycles. I knew I wasn’t completely out of danger yet because sometimes my classmates would follow me, but they always stayed across the street or half a block behind me, and even if they made comments in loud voices about my slummy ghetto neighborhood, at least they never attempted to talk to me or touch me.

“You seem so far away,” Kayla wrote. “It’s kind of unreal.” It was true. I was unreal and my life was unreal, and Sunnyvale, which was real, was a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space, and me and Dad were astronauts, living in a spaceship, orbiting in the cold blackness.

He started with Socrates and did approximately a philosopher per week. I don’t think it was helping him find the meaning of life, but at least it gave him a concrete goal, which counts for something. I believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.

had to do for school. We were doing direct proportions in math, and every time I saw a question like, If a train that travels 3 kilometers per minute goes y kilometers in x minutes, then . . . etc., my mind would go numb and all I could think about was how a body would look at the moment of impact, and the distance a head might be thrown on the tracks, and how far the blood would splatter.

I liked it that he’d pretty much given up on the idea of jobs altogether, and so he had free time to spend with me, even if I suspected that he would rather be dead.

A freeter, Ruth thought. That’s us. Frittering our lives away.

“My, isn’t that pretty! What are we celebrating?” “It’s the New Year, Mom.” “Really? What year is it?” “It’s the year 2000. It’s the new millennium.” “No!” her mother would exclaim, slapping her knees and falling back against the couch. “My goodness. Imagine that.” And then she would close her eyes and doze off again until the next burst of fireworks woke her, and she would sit up and lean forward. “My, isn’t that pretty! What are we celebrating?”

She put the diary aside and turned off the light. Next to her, she could hear Oliver’s breathing. A light rain pattered on the roof. When she closed her eyes, she could see the image of a bright red Hello Kitty lunchbox bobbing on the dull grey waves.

she changed the latter to kamikaze and hit RETURN. The search engine spun, and within moments she was on a community forum for military timepiece enthusiasts, reading about the provenance of the watch that she was holding in her hand, examining pictures of similar watches, learning that they were manufactured by the Seiko Company during World War II, and were favored by the kamikaze troops. For obvious reasons, although they were manufactured in large numbers, only a few survived.

Haruki #1?

Death is certain. Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind. So making a suicide is finding the edge of life.

Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore.

Even Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms.

Maybe you would like to ask me how does suicide make life feel real?

By making shadows bleed. You can feel life completely by taking it away.

Suicide feels like One Authentic Thing. Suicide feels like Meaning of Life. Suicide feels like having the Last Word. Suicide feels like stopping Time Forever.

As for methods, there are many. Hanging is one, and the most popular place for hanging suicide is near Mt. Fuji, in Aokigahara Woods. This place has the nickname “Suicide Forest” because of so many salarymen hanging from the branches in the sea of trees.

Unfortunately, suicide is popular with the youngsters, especially elementary and junior high school students, because of academic pressure and bullying.

Many club members prefer #3—charcoal briquette method. To do this method, they must rent an automobile together and drive to the countryside. Then they can put some nice music on the CD player and listen to it while dying from CO2 gas.

This is so simple! It must be nice to believe something simple like that.

Please teach me a simple American way to love my life so I do not have to think of suicide ever again. I want to find the meaning of my life for my daughter.

her biggest fear was Alzheimer’s. She’d watched her mother’s mind dwindle, and she was familiar with the corrosive effect that plaque can have on brain function.

Like her mother, Ruth often forgot things.

Her eyes are milky and blue because of her cataracts, and when she turns them inward, it’s like she’s moving into another world that’s frozen deep inside ice. Jiko calls her cataracts kuuge which means “flowers of emptiness.”55 I think that’s beautiful.

If you’ve ever tried to keep a diary, then you’ll know that the problem of trying to write about

the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction. It’s hopeless, really.

When I was a little kid in Sunnyvale, I became obsessed with the word now.

The word now always felt especially strange and unreal to me because it was me, at least the sound of it was.

Nao was now and had this whole other meaning. In Japan, some words have kotodama,56 which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power. The kotodama of now felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail that looked something like this: NOW felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. I was just a kid, and I thought if I could truly grasp the meaning of the big fish NOW, I would be able to save little fish Naoko, but the word always slipped away from me.

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.

My dad’s birthday was in May, and my funeral was one month later.

So Dad was doing really well for a suicidal person, and I was doing okay, too, for a torture victim.

the girls would cover their noses and mouths and look around and say, “Nanka kusai yo!60 Did something die?” and maybe that’s what gave them the idea for the funeral.

I pulled his head up and held the little kitchen knife to his throat. The knife was sharp, and I could see the vein pulsing in his spindly neck. It would have been no effort at all to cut him. It would have meant nothing.

“I don’t need your stinking money,” I said. “I want the card.” “Card?” “The one they were handing out at school. I know you have it.

In kagome rinchi, if you’re the oni, you have to kneel on the ground with your hands under your thighs, while the kids circle around, kicking and punching you and singing the kagome song. When the song is over, even if you could still use your voice, you wouldn’t dare guess the name of the kid behind you, because even if you guessed right, you would still be wrong and they’d start all over again.

It was an announcement, written in nice brush calligraphy, for a funeral service. The handwriting was formal and neat, like a grown-up’s, and I wondered if maybe Ugawa Sensei had written it. The funeral service was going to be on the following day during the last homeroom period before our midterm summer vacation. The deceased was former transfer student Yasutani Naoko.

My funeral was beautiful and very real. All the kids in my class were wearing black armbands, and they had set an altar on my desk with a candle and an incense burner and my school photograph, enlarged and framed and decorated with black and white ribbons.

The only part I remember goes like this: Shiki fu i ku, ku fu i shiki.70

It’s pretty abstract. Old Jiko tried to explain it to me, and I don’t know if I understood it correctly or not, but I think it means that nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things—including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you—are just kind of flowing through for the time being.

gaté gaté, para gaté, parasam gaté, boji sowa ka . . .

gone gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray . . .

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self.

The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift?

She needed to know if Nao was dead or alive.

He had been a bomber pilot during World War II, he told her, stationed at an air base in the Aleutians. They used to fly out every day, looking for Japanese targets.

Before my funeral, I was getting metal-bound a lot, but it stopped after my funeral, probably because I became a ghost myself. I ate and slept, I wrote email to Kayla sometimes, but inside I knew I was dead, even if my parents didn’t notice.