Tag Archives: Ozeki

A Tale for the Time Being: Time/Age

Other than life/death, I think the strongest theme in A Tale for the Time Being is the theme of time or age and how that can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Time plays a huge role, both in terms of the timeline difference between Ruth and Nao, but also how each character handles their time. Nao feels that at the age of 16, she has already wasted all her time. She feels as though she has accomplished nothing in her life, and fantasizes about ending her time on earth. She refers to herself as a Time Being, something Ruth embraces in the end as well. Ruth is lost in what could be described as writer’s block, and has felt as though she has wasted a lot of time not working on her memoir. Reflection and memory is a huge component of time, and the characters in this novel reflect upon the past a lot.

Nao is always thinking about the “happier” times – her life back in Sunnyvale, her old friends, her father’s happiness – and Ruth thinks about her life in New York as well as her mother before she died. Before long, Ruth begins to pour most of her time into this diary, and despite their difference of age, connects with Nao at a most personal level. At one point, Ruth refers to writing as the “opposite of suicide”, meaning that writing is “about immortality. Defeating death or at least forestalling it”. The theme of life and death are very much tied to time and age, and Nao’s diary preserves her 2001 teenage self as if she poured a bit of her soul into it (harry potter reference!), which lends to the idea that writing is a form of “time travel”.

A Tale for the Time Being: Death/Life

One of the strongest themes in A Tale for the Time Being is the theme of Life and Death and what this means for the character of Nao. For my money, I felt that both Ruth and Nao’s stories emphasized different sides of the same coin, meaning that I took the theme of death from Nao and the theme of life from Ruth. Nao is a girl who is obsessed with suicide, and speaks about it very casually through her diary. She almost glamorizes it to the point where it would seem like an honorable thing, but you can tell that the thought of her father’s suicide greatly disturbs her. Through her diary, we can see that death seems to loom over the life of her family. Her great uncle Haruki #1 was a suicide pilot, and Nao becomes enamored by his story to the point where she “unfairly” tries to compare him to her father. When it came to her father’s botched suicide attempts, Nao basically tells him “Man up like Haruki #1. If you’re gonna do it, do it properly”, which speaks more about her frustration with her father than her “words of encouragement”.

Even ghosts seem to make their way into this story, like when Haruki #1 returns in spectral form to Nao. Haruki’s letters contain a certain air of death, like storm clouds shrouding the country side, due to the nature of his position during the war. These letters reveal a deep personal shame of Haruki, and the darkness of his inevitable death resting in his mind. The truth that Haruki #1 chose to die on his own terms instead of taking the lives of others only strengthens this theme. Through all of this, Ruth becomes obsessed with Nao’s life and is taken by the idea that she needs to “save Nao”, possibly from death or from herself. Ruth’s own life has become bored and unproductive as she has been sitting on an unfinished memoir for years and I think Nao’s diary gives Ruth a much needed kick start in terms of getting her inquisitive mind going again – meaning something to focus on.

Ozeki

I think that communication is one of the key themes so far. Communicative styles like letter writing and storytelling are the major methods utilized.

I enjoyed the one-sided communication through Nao’s diary. She is writing to an unknown individual, and the individual, Ruth, has no way to reply. I think that the one-sidedness makes it more like storytelling or a letter that Ruth can’t reply to. Ruth, as a writer, is in a similar position. She writes to an unknown, and tells them a story, the reader can’t reply.

The use of text messages, email, and phone calls are the shown forms of modern communication. The letters from the pilot is a more traditional communication style. The verbal and nonverbal communication between the human characters and the animals is also prominent.

Week 7: Friday. Ozeki and a chosen theme (part 1)

Loss. (Running away. Abandonment.)

If your whole body cannot survive the sea, maybe a piece of you can.

The reality of losing others by way you can’t control and realizing you have also lost yourself. Trying to gain clarity by writing everything down, hopefully so those thoughts will lose themselves from your brain and instead stick to pages, staining them with hurt of your father and the friendships you were told to expect. Turning what is real and intangible onto something that can be closed and put away and learning how to manipulate the letters which represent you. Finding a way to turn a situation which you did not ask for and which is out of your control into one that you can handle. Feeling angry towards those around who have abandoned you and left you alone and so deciding that you will abandon them, too.
“So right now, I’m a ronin” (page 41).

Loss of reality. Is reality what has physically happened or how it is remembered? Do you trust Ruth? Do you trust Nao? Do you trust their realities? A young girl feeling alone and writing stories the way she dreams of them happening (empowerment through knife to flesh and being the hero of her own story, because she has abandoned her once-self to recreate the way we visualize her) versus an older woman trying to make sense of her life as she experienced. Ruth as the present, Nao as the future, Jinko as the past. Or perhaps, Ruth as young girl, Ruth as herself, and Ruth as she hopes to be at some point in time. Or perhaps, Ruth as the past, I as the future, and the present: keep reading and see.

Is Nao now or are we tricking ourselves by repeating a word so many times we lose what is true?

The loss of time. Mid-life crisis. Trying to do it over or finding your “true” (alternative) purpose. Feeling neglected and so turning your attention to another being, another anxious voice outside your own bored mind, and putting new energy into their struggles. Spending hours on the internet, looking for some clues as to whether you believe her or not. A watch with a serial number as evidence. The name of a town where all the whales ran away as evidence. In sending her journal off, Nao runs away from the reality she has made permanent. Like the tagging of subway trains, we believe in Nao because she gave us evidence of her existence. But is that evidence Ruth’s outlet to run or Nao’s?

Something was here. Do not run away. This is a story of survival. Pay attention and turn the page.

Communication Theme

The other day I was talking to my room mate about how a restaurant I went to once a long time ago, had a mini flat screen television at every single table so that patrons can watch T.V. while they ate their meals. I turned on the T.V. but only for five or so minutes because I couldn’t stand that me and my partner at the time were just not communicating to each other and just zoned out on the T.V. Then I started thinking though, how is a mini flat screen any different from the smart phones that we carry in our pocket?

I work in the service industry at a restaurant, and I find myself noticing more and more that patrons are starting to communicate less to one another in real life and becoming more and more attached to their phones, most likely communicating to other people outside of where they are at the time.

If it weren’t for things like social media, I think I would have less friends. I wouldn’t be able to stay in touch with people I have met in my life. This even goes for my family. I remember growing up feeling so sad that I rarely communicated with my cousins or family in Japan but now with social media and other outlets, I can now stay in touch with them very easily.

So it’s weird though that even though a cell phone, or texting in some ways brings us closer to each other but in other ways it distance us from other people too.

Communication in this book is so prominent, whether it’s Nao communicating with her grandmother via text messaging, to Nao communicating with Ruth through her diary, or how the post mistress communicates with the entire town about Ruth’s finding. When you think about someone or something aging, some things that come to mind is the loss of something, whether it’s memory or freshness but as our world gets older, it’s developing newer ways to communicate yet the communication is losing it’s meaning more and more due to the newer findings (some people argue that communicating over the internet is shallow). Like Jiko, as she becomes older, she is communicating less (she is of few words) yet what she says is very meaningful and can be interpreted in different ways.

A Tale for the Time Being, pgs 1-108

Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being

While reading the first leg of the book, I found it fascinating the way Ozeki broke up the structure of the book, blending Ruth’s own close reading of the material with the POV of Nao’s diary. Through this, we get to be inside Nao’s head and also Ruth’s, and it gives us a chance to interpret Nao’s words before Ruth even gets there. What gives Ruth such a drive to discover the truth behind this diary? It seems to me that Ruth has found a strong connection with Nao – a certain, desolate familiarity perhaps?

Nao is a very depressed person who has felt like time has slipped completely from her. At the tender age of 16, we find a person who has already given up on life. She is separated from the life she loved (in Sunnyvale) and has become this invisible, anonymous person. I feel Ruth might sympathize with such feelings, as she too is cut off from the life she loved (in New York) for a place where it seems, at least to me, that she might be too settled in. Her own concept of time loss corresponds with Nao’s, but Ruth’s loss is symbolized in a memoir that seems determined to remain unfinished. I also found a sense of “burden” placed upon both women’s shoulders. In Nao’s case, her father is suicidal and bares much of the weight for what happened to the family, which obviously affects Nao because she deeply worries about her father. Ruth had her own parental “burden” with her mother having Alzheimer’s, but since her mother’s death, has felt like perhaps she has done nothing worthwhile with her life since that “burden” passed. I’m eager to see how this connection develops but so far this is my take on it.