A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

My dad was dead and he had already forgotten all about me.

“Ah,” he said. “The pleasure is mine.” His words were thin and blue, curling like the smoke from the burning tip of an incense stick.

I figured it out: if this ghost who had answered to my father’s name wasn’t my father, then he must be my father’s uncle, the suicide bomber, Yasutani Haruki #1.

Did he have a big cold fish dying in the hollow of his stomach? Or was he filled with a luminous calm that emanated from him

Jiko’s study. She doesn’t mind me being there, so I don’t know why it felt like sneaking. It’s my favorite room in the temple, overlooking the garden, with a low desk where she likes to write, and a small bookshelf with a lot of fat old religious and philosophy books with faded cloth bindings. Jiko told me that the philosophical ones belonged to Haruki #1, from when he was in university.

This is my last night on earth. Tomorrow I will tie a cloth around my forehead, branded with the Rising Sun, and take to the sky. Tomorrow I will die for my country.

Soon the waves will quench this fire —my life—burning in the moonlight. Listen! Can you hear the voices calling from the bottom of the sea?

Empty words, you know, but my heart is full of love.

Her voice sounded agitated. Missing things upset her. Missing price tags. Missing memories. Missing parts of her life.

“December 10, 1943—We sleep together in one large room, my squadron members and I, laid out in rows like small fish hung to dry.”

“Haruki Number One,” Oliver said. “Interesting.” He nudged the arm of the co-pilot chair and watched Pesto slowly rotate. “I wonder why he wrote it in French . . .” “So nobody could read it? Benoit said he was hiding it from the other soldiers in his squadron.”

“That’s what Nao wrote. So she’s hiding her diary inside Proust, and he’s hiding his diary by writing in French. Secret French diaries seem to run in the family.”

The sudden disappearance of

“The Instability of the Female ‘I’” had upset her.

As she stared at the restless pixels on her screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online,

It reminded her of the peculiar arrhythmic gait of Parkinson’s patients in the hospice where her mother spent the last months of her life, the way they lurched and stalled as they made their way down the hallways to the dining room and eventually to their deaths.

“I think I’m going crazy,” she said. “Do you think I’m going crazy?” They were lying in bed.

“She’d written, ‘Up, down, same thing.’ And then later when they were at the beach, Jiko said those exact same words . . . ‘up, down, same thing.’

‘Up, down, same thing.’

Stuff disappearing, like that article. I tried to find it again, but I couldn’t. And the publication? The Journal of Oriental Metaphysics? Gone, too. I can’t find it anywhere.”

I wasn’t sure whether to tell Jiko about meeting the ghost of Haruki #1.

I decided just to wait to see if Haruki #1 would come back.

Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that’s what a drum does. When you beat a drum, you create NOW,

as I was about to escape, I heard a noise behind me, like an old door sliding open or someone clearing his throat. The first thing they taught us was how to kill ourselves.

Maybe you think that’s strange? We were soldiers, but even before they showed us how to kill our enemies, they taught us how to kill ourselves.

They gave us rifles. They showed us how to use our big toe to pull the trigger. How to lodge the tip of the barrel in the V of our jawbone so it wouldn’t slip . . .

When the voice spoke again, I could barely hear it. That box on the altar. Next to the photographs. Do you see it? On the altar was a box wrapped in a white cloth. I’d seen it there every day. It looked like a present.

She said the box contained the remains of Haruki #1, but when I thought it over, it didn’t make any sense.

No sense. No sense at all . . . And then he was gone.

Obon lasted for a total of four days, and it’s a crazy time for a couple of nuns.

After Obon, it was just the three of us again, but before we could settle back into our routine, summer vacation was over, and I only had a few days left before my dad came to pick me up and take me home.

like “I Bereave I Can Fry,”

“Impossible Dream,”

It’s a sentimental song about how it’s okay to have impossible goals, because if you follow your unreachable star no matter how hopeless or far, your heart will be peaceful when you’re dead, even though you might be scorned and covered with scars like I am while you’re still alive.

I was telling her all about Haruki #1’s ghost, how he’d visited me on the temple steps on the first night of Obon but he left because I couldn’t think of any interesting conversational topics and I sang him a dumb French chanson instead.

“No. Haruki never hated Americans. He hated war. He hated fascism. He hated the government and its bullying politics of imperialism and capitalism and exploitation.

“It was late October. There was a pageant. Twenty-five thousand student draftees marched into the compound outside Meiji Shrine.

Tojo Hideki. It is not true, what I said before, because I hated him.

“Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.

Jiko was right. I couldn’t believe it. Just to be sure, I turned it upside down and shook it. A small slip of paper fell to the floor.

“They sent us a box with the remains of our beloved children. If the bodies weren’t found,

“I opened it just like you did,” she said. “And just like that, the paper fell out. I was so surprised! I read it and then I laughed and laughed.

My daughters were not writers. To a writer, this is so funny. To send a word, instead of a body! Haruki was a writer. He would have understood. If he had been there, he would have laughed, too, and for a moment that’s what it felt like, like he was there with me and we were laughing together.”

“It was the nicest consolation,” she said. “Given the circumstances. But I could never bring myself to put it into the family grave. That last word was not his, after all. It was the government’s.”

“You may read them,” Jiko said. “But please remember these aren’t his last words, either.”

“And this,” she said. “Take this, too.” She was holding an old wristwatch. It had a round black face and steel hands and a steel case and a big knob on the side for winding. I took it and held it to my ear.

The first was the kanji for sky. The second was the kanji for soldier. Sky soldier. That made sense. But the character for sky can also mean “empty.” Empty soldier. That made sense, too.

She nodded and seemed satisfied. “I’m glad you met him while you were here,” she said. “He was a good boy. Smart like you. He took his life seriously. He would have liked you.”

“It has been a great pleasure to meet you,” I said, in my most polite Japanese. “I hope I may look forward to your company again next summer. Please continue to take good care of dear Jiko Obaachama until I get back, okay? Oh, and thanks for the watch.”

At dinner he announced that he was going to take me to Disneyland on the way home.