Tag Archives: A Tale For The Time Being

p.s.

A Tale for the Time Being

As A Tale for the Time Being starts out, we are introduced to the young and friendly Nao, a girl who writes to us – and to Ruth, of course – from at least two years back in time, when she and her family are at their lowest possible point.

As the story progresses, we learn how to be time beings, if only for the time being, and we learn that we have always been a time being, right alongside Nao.

But Nao’s time is limited – that’s much of what the first portion of the book seems to be about in my eyes. Nao and her limited time, even if Nao herself is the one limiting it. There’s a line early on in the book that sets the framework for the entirety of her chapters.

“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.” (Ozeki, pg 69)

Though obvious that Nao wanted to write about the great-grandmother that she adored unconditionally, I believe the start of her tale was also a way that she was trying very hard not to live her own life. Instead she immersed herself in the life of Jiko Yasutani, who believed women could be strong and were mistreated, but still had a good heart of her own and compassion regardless of who or what you are. Jiko was unimaginably kind, and I believe that Nao wanted very much to be the kind of woman that her great-grandmother was, as opposed to the Nao Yasutani that was picked on regularly in school.  We see the dark side to Nao’s life immediately; Nao wants to be something, anything other than Nao, and it doesn’t take us long to understand why that might be the case. She becomes obsessed with the idea of suicide, largely in part at first because of her father. They say that having a relative attempt or commit suicide increases the risk of you yourself attempting it. (more info here)

In this way, Ruth is much the antithesis of Nao. Nao found comfort in the countryside, while Ruth felt more stifled; where Nao was uneasy because of the people who lived in the bigger area, Ruth found life in a big city relatively easy to deal with. From the start of the book, Ruth and Nao are set up as opposites Nao spends the majority of the book trying to find her place in the world, while Ruth already has her own. While their circumstances were significantly different and understandable in all regards, this is an important thing to keep in mind.

I felt further evidence revealed itself as the book went on, and while Nao’s life grew more chaotic, Ruth’s life began to make less and less sense as time went on.  She had dreams that seemed to influence Nao’s journal and her life, her memory began to act up. She began to have an existential crisis, wondering if perhaps she wasn’t real at all, and maybe Nao had just written her into existence.  By the end of the book this becomes even more of an issue when Nao (alongside her father) seems to choose life instead of death after the death of Jiko and finding the journal that belonged to Haruki #1. While Nao chooses life, Ruth becomes even more uncertain of her place in the world. She finds less and less comfort in her conversations with Oliver, to the point that he needs to tell her that she’s being irrational about her assumptions, and if she’s going to continue thinking about something so out there that she should at least be somewhat logical about it instead of basing it on information that doesn’t really exist.

Nao finally finds her place in the world, and in a way Ruth loses hers. Stability is replaced with instability, and stability is replaced with instability.

As for the ending, I think there are a few different things that Ruth could be. One of the first – and perhaps more logical – might be that her dreams and memory issues were in fact an unfortunately early onset of Alzheimer’s. This could account for a number of things, but I think in a world such as this, for time beings such as Ruth and Nao, that this explanation is a bit too simple.

In that way, I think the next best possibility would be that Ruth was, in essence, a time being. I think that what she was didn’t really matter a great deal, because she had all she needed to be a time being, even if her time was built in a different way than someone else’s might be. She could be a creation of Nao’s, but does it matter?

p.s.

A Tale for the Time Being

As A Tale for the Time Being starts out, we are introduced to the young and friendly Nao, a girl who writes to us – and to Ruth, of course – from at least two years back in time, when she and her family are at their lowest possible point.

As the story progresses, we learn how to be time beings, if only for the time being, and we learn that we have always been a time being, right alongside Nao.

But Nao’s time is limited – that’s much of what the first portion of the book seems to be about in my eyes. Nao and her limited time, even if Nao herself is the one limiting it. There’s a line early on in the book that sets the framework for the entirety of her chapters.

“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.” (Ozeki, pg 69)

Though obvious that Nao wanted to write about the great-grandmother that she adored unconditionally, I believe the start of her tale was also a way that she was trying very hard not to live her own life. Instead she immersed herself in the life of Jiko Yasutani, who believed women could be strong and were mistreated, but still had a good heart of her own and compassion regardless of who or what you are. Jiko was unimaginably kind, and I believe that Nao wanted very much to be the kind of woman that her great-grandmother was, as opposed to the Nao Yasutani that was picked on regularly in school.  We see the dark side to Nao’s life immediately; Nao wants to be something, anything other than Nao, and it doesn’t take us long to understand why that might be the case. She becomes obsessed with the idea of suicide, largely in part at first because of her father. They say that having a relative attempt or commit suicide increases the risk of you yourself attempting it. (more info here)

In this way, Ruth is much the antithesis of Nao. Nao found comfort in the countryside, while Ruth felt more stifled; where Nao was uneasy because of the people who lived in the bigger area, Ruth found life in a big city relatively easy to deal with. From the start of the book, Ruth and Nao are set up as opposites Nao spends the majority of the book trying to find her place in the world, while Ruth already has her own. While their circumstances were significantly different and understandable in all regards, this is an important thing to keep in mind.

I felt further evidence revealed itself as the book went on, and while Nao’s life grew more chaotic, Ruth’s life began to make less and less sense as time went on.  She had dreams that seemed to influence Nao’s journal and her life, her memory began to act up. She began to have an existential crisis, wondering if perhaps she wasn’t real at all, and maybe Nao had just written her into existence.  By the end of the book this becomes even more of an issue when Nao (alongside her father) seems to choose life instead of death after the death of Jiko and finding the journal that belonged to Haruki #1. While Nao chooses life, Ruth becomes even more uncertain of her place in the world. She finds less and less comfort in her conversations with Oliver, to the point that he needs to tell her that she’s being irrational about her assumptions, and if she’s going to continue thinking about something so out there that she should at least be somewhat logical about it instead of basing it on information that doesn’t really exist.

Nao finally finds her place in the world, and in a way Ruth loses hers. Stability is replaced with instability, and stability is replaced with instability.

As for the ending, I think there are a few different things that Ruth could be. One of the first – and perhaps more logical – might be that her dreams and memory issues were in fact an unfortunately early onset of Alzheimer’s. This could account for a number of things, but I think in a world such as this, for time beings such as Ruth and Nao, that this explanation is a bit too simple.

In that way, I think the next best possibility would be that Ruth was, in essence, a time being. I think that what she was didn’t really matter a great deal, because she had all she needed to be a time being, even if her time was built in a different way than someone else’s might be. She could be a creation of Nao’s, but does it matter?

Islands

Click here to view the embedded video.

Words and film by Jude Wasserman

The words are a wave crashing over me. Riptides pulling us apart until we are two separate islands. In a year we will be almost strangers, and even now it is a struggle to imagine the softness of your lips, or the tug of our fingers entwined. Secrets crumble like fragile flowers pressed between pages of a book long ago discarded. Funny how the tide can sneak up on you, rising until it covers your ankles, your belly button, your throat. Saltwater burns, and eyes cloud until you can no longer recognize the space between particles.

“I’m going to go home tonight and this is it. It’ll be over”. 
This moment is captured crystalline in sickly sweet amber.

In my dreams you are still enchanted with me. I hold you while you shiver with cold sweat and fever. 
We met in a now outside of time, and so much of our love was islands colliding. When you are sick, you miss me, you miss your mother. And i understand how our connection is within and outside of now, and this too will be swept into the circuits and flows of cold seawater.

(Song is “Medicine” from A Stick and A Stone (astickandastone.com/)

Passages and Carceral Archipelagos

It felt fitting to me that Chico would mention carceral studies on Friday. I’ve been turning two ideas around in my head lately: Islands, and passages.

Foucault coined the term “carceral archipelago” to describe the expansive reach of state control over many aspects of people’s lives. After reading Ozeki, I’m seeing islands everywhere in my own life. Just like there are many kinds of incarceration, there are also many kinds of islands. Ruth and Nao are both geographically isolated on their individual islands, in many ways displaced from “home” (wherever/whatever that is). The diary acts as a bridge or passage between islands, physical and temporal. Passage as in text, as in rite of passage (Nao and Ruth’s), as in the passage of time, as in passing from one place to the next. The diary is also a passage to the reader, both Ruth and the person reading A Tale For The Time Being.

Hauntings

I’m having a hard time doing the writing for this week. A Tale For The Time Being was extremely emotional for me, and I’m afraid that none of my writing will do justice to the connections I’ve been making. Suicide is a raw spot for me, a person who holds great significance in my life killed themself in January of last year. This was someone who was at one point my partner, and also someone who was extremely violent. Suicide humanized this person to me, and completely changed the ways that I think about our actions within structures of violence. I spend a lot of time wondering about ghosts. About hauntings. They’re contagious. Aokigahra, the suicide forest that is mentioned in A Tale For The Time Being used to be a regular forest. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Seicho Matsumoto wrote a novel where the main characters killed themselves in Aokigahra, and ever since it’s been a popular spot for suicide. Once the thought got into peoples’ heads it just spread and spread. Nao gets the chance to speak to the spirit of Haruki #1, but i believe that it’s not only ghosts of humans that can haunt you. A phrase, a painting, a video, an idea can haunt you. It gets in you, and changes you. How do you think Seicho Matsumoto felt after realizing that his book haunted so many people? His idea dispersed until it changed the narrative, even the name of the forest. I can already tell that A Tale For the Time Being is going to haunt me for awhile, and I think i’m ok with that.

A Tale for the Time Being: Communication

At the crux of the novel, it’s the communication between Nao and Ruth which carry the spirit of the story and, of course, give us something to read. Communication, or lack of, is a HUGE component of A Tale for the Time Being. There are many forms of communication throughout the story, such as the diary, talking or texting, but also more abstract forms of communication. For example, diaries are typically very personal things, but Nao’s is different – it’s inviting, mysterious and yearns to tell a story in itself. She is directly talking to whoever or whatever is in contact with her diary, be it the reader or the dustbin on the street. Nao is very determined to share her tragic point of view with anyone who is willing to read. It’s in my experience that depression or sadness often results in a “cry for help” even if it’s not apparent. It seems to me that due to the lack of communication between Nao and her parents, this diary is exactly that – a cry for help, a way to make sense of bad circumstances.

I view it almost as a psychological case-study, looking at an individual who suffers from bullying and neglect. I also find the visions Nao seems to have – such as Haruki #1′s ghost – to perhaps be extensions of this? Viewing it from another angle, Haruki’s ghost could be an extension of her feelings for her father considering she goes to great lengths to compare the two Harukis. And if it’s a real ghost, than perhaps communication from the afterlife is a valid answer. Ruth’s own memoir also serves a form of communication, as I interpret it as a much more “official” form Nao’s diary, albeit unfinished. Ruth’s dreams of Jiko, like Haruki’s ghost, serve as an otherworldly form of communication – perhaps it’s Ruth’s subconscious communicating with her. Maybe it’s Nao’s spirit making connection with Ruth? I mean if Nao’s fate is left unanswered, than we could theorize that perhaps Nao did die and maybe this is her way to reaching out to Ruth? I have no idea, but I like to speculate on these kinds of things.

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.

A Look on Life and Death in “A Tale for the Time Being”

“The truth is that very soon I’m going to graduate from time, or maybe I shouldn’t say graduate because that makes it sound as if I’ve actually met my goals and deserve to move on, when the fact is that I just turned sixteen and I’ve accomplished nothing at all.  Zilch. Nada. Do I sound pathetic? I don’t mean to. I just want to be accurate. Maybe instead of graduate, I should say I’m going to drop out of time. Drop out. Time out. Exit my existence. I’m counting the moments.” (P.7)

Time and death. Two inseparable themes in life, and this novel weaves them together like a water-tight basket. This novel explores the idea of death in several different ways, most obviously and notably within Nao’s own narratives.  Though funny and youthful, she connects most of her life events with the inevitability of her own death, or suicide as it would be in her case. Her narrative relies centrally on the fact that she is going to die. Revealed as the purpose of her writing the journal which now resides in the hands of Ruth, the quote above is Nao’s explanation for the journal.

Suicide is particularly emphasized within this novel.  Nao’s father attempts suicide via Chuo Rapid Express, a  famous suicide spot.  Nao’s father’s Uncle, also known within the novel as Haruki #1, was a Kamikaze pilot in World War II.  Nao, who also struggles with her own feelings on suicide, notes “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…” (P.68).

In Nao’s future, a woman named Ruth is reading her journal, trying to understand her life.  It is understood that the history of the novel and this history of our world coincide, so we as readers are aware that a large tsunami and earthquake hit Japan some time after the writing of Nao’s journal.  This, in and of itself, presents the theme of death more ambiguously than the previously mentioned examples.  While Ruth reads Nao’s journal, we as readers feel as though she is alive, at least for the time being. Though when we are presented with Ruth’s narrative, there is an ethereal understanding that Nao and her family may have perished in the wake of the tragedies that Japan suffered.

To me, these were the most important life and death themes, at least to the current place in the novel we are at. If you think I missed anything important, please post in the comments so that I can expand on the ideas.

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.