by Ruth Ozeki
Ruth flipped through the letters, trying to make out the characters that were written in faded blue ink. “The handwriting’s old and cursive. Beautiful, but I can’t read a word of it.” She put the letters down and took the watch from him. “Yes,” she said. “They’re Japanese numbers. Not a date, though. Yon, nana, san, hachi, nana. Four, seven, three, eight, seven. Maybe a serial number?”
She held the watch up to her ear and listened for the ticking, but it was broken. She put it down and picked up the bright red lunchbox. The red color showing through the scarred plastic was what had led her to mistake the freezer bag for a stinging jellyfish. How long had it been floating out there in the ocean before washing up? The lunchbox lid had a rubber gasket around the rim. She picked up the book, which was surprisingly dry; the cloth cover was soft and worn, its corners blunt from rough handling. She put the edge to her nose and inhaled the musty scent of mildewed pages and dust. She looked at the title.
“ ‘À la recherche du temps perdu,’ ” she read. “Par Marcel Proust.”
4.
They liked books, all books, but especially old ones, and their house was overflowing with them. There were books everywhere, stacked on shelves and piled on the floor, on chairs, on the stairway treads, but neither Ruth nor Oliver minded. Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books. And indeed, buying books was her consolation for moving to a remote island in the middle of Desolation Sound, where the public library was one small humid room above the community hall, overrun with children. In addition to the extensive and dog-eared juvenile literature section and some popular adult titles, the library’s collection seemed largely to comprise books on gardening, canning, food security, alternative energy, alternative healing, and alternative schooling. Ruth missed the abundance and diversity of urban libraries, their quiet spaciousness, and when she and Oliver moved to the small island, they agreed that she should be able to order any book she wanted, which she did. Research, she called it, although in the end he’d read most of them, while she’d read only a few. She just liked having them around. Recently, however, she had started to notice that the damp sea air had swollen their pages and the silverfish had taken up residence in their spines. When she opened the covers, they smelled of mold. This made her sad.
“In search of lost time,” she said, translating the tarnished gilt title, embossed on the red cloth spine. “I’ve never read it.”
“I haven’t, either,” said Oliver. “I don’t think I’ll be trying it in French, though.”
“Mm,” she said, agreeing, but then she opened the cover, anyway, curious to see if she could understand just the first few lines. She was expecting to see an age-stained folio, printed in an antique font, so she was entirely unprepared for the adolescent purple handwriting that sprawled across the page. It felt like a desecration, and it shocked her so much she almost dropped the book.
5.
Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye.
Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
Ruth stared at the page. The purple words were mostly in English, with some Japanese characters scattered here and there, but her eye wasn’t really taking in their meaning as much as a felt sense, murky and emotional, of the writer’s presence. The fingers that had gripped the purple gel ink pen must have belonged to a girl, a teenager. Her handwriting, these loopy purple marks impressed onto the page, retained her moods and anxieties, and the moment Ruth laid eyes on the page, she knew without a doubt that the girl’s fingertips were pink and moist, and that she had bitten her nails down to the quick.
Ruth looked more closely at the letters. They were round and a little bit sloppy (as she now imagined the girl must be, too), but they stood more or less upright and marched gamely across the page at a good clip, not in a hurry, but not dawdling, either. Sometimes at the end of a line, they crowded each other a little, like people jostling to get onto an elevator or into a subway car, just as the doors were closing. Ruth’s curiosity was piqued. It was clearly a diary of some kind. She examined the cover again. Should she read it? Deliberately now, she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people’s business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.
Hi!, she read. My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? . . .
6.
“Flotsam,” Oliver said. He was examining the barnacles that had grown onto the surface of the outer plastic bag. “I can’t believe it.”
Ruth glanced up from the page. “Of course it’s flotsam,” she said. “Or jetsam.” The book felt warm in her hands, and she wanted to continue reading but heard herself asking, instead, “What’s the difference, anyway?”
“Flotsam is accidental, stuff found floating at sea. Jetsam’s been jettisoned. It’s a matter of intent. So you’re right, maybe this is jetsam.” He laid the bag back down onto the table. “I think it’s starting.”
“What’s starting?”
“Drifters,” he said. “Escaping the orbit of the Pacific Gyre . . .”
His eyes were sparkling and she could tell he was excited. She rested the book in her lap. “What’s a gyre?”
“There are eleven great planetary gyres,” he said. “Two of them flow directly toward us from Japan and diverge just off the BC coastline. The smaller one, the Aleut Gyre, goes north toward the Aleutian Islands. The larger one goes south. It’s sometimes called the Turtle Gyre, because the sea turtles ride it when they migrate from Japan to Baja.”
He held up his hands to describe a big circle. The cat, who had fallen asleep on the table, must have sensed his excitement, because he opened a green eye to watch.
“Imagine the Pacific,” Oliver said. “The Turtle Gyre goes clockwise, and the Aleut Gyre goes counterclockwise.” His hands moved in the great arcs and spirals of the ocean’s flow.
“Isn’t this the same as the Kuroshio?”
He’d told her about the Kuroshio already. It was also called the Black Current, and it brought warm tropical water up from Asia and over to the Pacific Northwest coast.
But now he shook his head. “Not quite,” he said. “Gyres are bigger. Like a string of currents. Imagine a ring of snakes, each biting the tail of the one ahead of it. The Kuroshio is one of four or five currents that make up the Turtle Gyre.”
She nodded. She closed her eyes and pictured the snakes.
“Each gyre orbits at its own speed,” he continued. “And the length of an orbit is called a tone. Isn’t that beautiful? Like the music of the spheres. The longest orbital period is thirteen years, which establishes the fundamental tone. The Turtle Gyre has a half tone of six and a half years. The Aleut Gyre, a quarter tone of three. The flotsam that rides the gyres is called drift. Drift that stays in the orbit of the gyre is considered to be part of the gyre memory. The rate of escape from the gyre determines the half-life of drift . . .”
He picked up the Hello Kitty lunchbox and turned it over in his hands. “All that stuff from people’s homes in Japan that the tsunami swept out to sea? They’ve been tracking it and predicting it will wash up on our coastline. I think it’s just happening sooner than anyone expected.”
Nao
1.
There’s so much to write. Where should I start?
I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote back this: .10
Okay, my dear old Jiko. I’ll start right here at Fifi’s Lovely Apron. Fifi’s is one of a bunch of maid cafés that popped up all over Akiba Electricity Town11 a couple of years ago, but what makes Fifi’s a little bit special is the French salon theme. The interior is decorated mostly in pink and red, with accents of gold and ebony and ivory. The tables are round and cozy, with marblelike tops and legs that look like carved mahogany, and the matching chairs have pink puff tapestry
seats. Dark red velvet roses curl up the wallpaper, and the windows are draped in satin. The ceiling is gilded and hung with crystal chandeliers, and little naked Kewpie dolls float like clouds in the corners. There’s an entryway and coatroom with a trickling fountain and a statue of a nude lady lit by a throbbing red spot.
I don’t know if this decor is authentic or not as I’ve never visited France, but I’m going to guess that probably there aren’t many French maid cafés like this in Paris. It doesn’t matter. The feeling at Fifi’s Lovely Apron is very chic and intimate, like being stuffed inside a great big claustrophobic valentine, and the maids, with their pushed-up breasts and frilly uniforms, look like cute little valentines, too.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty empty in here right now, except for some otaku12 types at the corner table, and two bug-eyed American tourists. The maids are standing in a sulky line, picking at the lace on their petticoats and looking bored and disappointed with us, like they’re hoping for some new and better customers to come in and liven things up. There was a little bit of excitement a while ago when one otaku ordered omurice13 with a big red Hello Kitty face painted in ketchup on top. A maid whose name tag says she’s Mimi knelt down before him to feed him, blowing on each bite before spooning it into his mouth. The Americans got a real kick out of that, which was hilarious. I wish you could have seen it. But then he finished, and Mimi took his dirty plate away, and now it’s boring again. The Americans are just drinking coffees. The husband is trying to get his wife to let him order a Hello Kitty omurice, too, but she’s way too uptight. I heard her whispering that the omurice is too expensive, and she’s got a point. The food here is a total rip-off, but I get my coffee for free because Babette is my friend. I’ll let you know if the wife loosens up and changes her mind.
It didn’t used to be this way. Back when maid cafés were ninki #1!14 Babette told me that the customers used to line up and wait for hours just to get a table, and the maids were all the prettiest girls in Tokyo, and you could hear them over the noise of Electricity Town calling out, Okaerinasaimase, dannasama!,15 which makes men feel rich and important. But now the fad is over and maids are no longer it, and the only customers are tourists from abroad, and otaku16 from the countryside, or sad hentai with out-of-date fetishes for maids. And the maids, too, are not so pretty or cute anymore, since you can make a lot more money being a nurse at a medical café or a fuzzy plushy in Bedtown.17 French maids are downward trending for sure, and everyone knows this, so nobody’s bothering to try very hard. You could say it’s a depressing ambience, but personally, I find it relaxing exactly because nobody’s trying too hard. What’s depressing is when everyone is trying too hard, and the most depressing thing of all is when they’re trying too hard and actually thinking that they’re making it. I’m sure that’s what it used to be like around here, with all the cheerful jangle of bells and laughing, and lines of customers around the block, and cute little maids sucking up to the café owners, who slouched around in their designer sunglasses and vintage Levi’s like dark princes or game-empire moguls. Those dudes had a long, long way to fall.
So I don’t mind this at all. I kind of like it because I know I can always get a table here at Fifi’s Lovely Apron, and the music is okay, and the maids know me now and usually leave me alone. Maybe it should be called Fifi’s Lonely Apron. Hey, that’s good! I like that!
2.
My old Jiko really likes it when I tell her lots of details about modern life. She doesn’t get out very much anymore because she lives in a temple in the mountains in the middle of nowhere and has renounced the world, and also there’s the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that’s her age, but actually I’m just guessing. We don’t really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn’t remember, either. When you ask her, she says,
“Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne.”18
Which is not an answer, so you ask her again, and she says,
“Soo desu ne.19 I haven’t counted for so long . . .”
So then you ask her when her birthday is, and she says,
“Hmm, I don’t really remember being born . . .”
And if you pester her some more and ask her how long she’s been alive, she says,
“I’ve always been here as far as I remember.”
Well, duh, Granny!
All we know for sure is that there’s nobody older than her who remembers, and the family register at the ward office got burned up in a firebombing during World War II, so basically we have to take her word for it. A couple of years ago, she kind of got fixated on a hundred and four, and that’s what it’s been ever since.
And as I was saying, my old Jiko really likes detail, and she likes it when I tell her about all the little sounds and smells and colors and lights and advertising and people and fashions and newspaper headlines that make up the noisy ocean of Tokyo, which is why I’ve trained myself to notice and remember. I tell her everything, about cultural trends and news items I read about high school girls who get raped and suffocated with plastic bags in love hotels. You can tell Granny all that kind of stuff and she doesn’t mind. I don’t mean it makes her happy. She’s not a hentai. But she understands that shit happens, and she just sits there and listens and nods her head and counts the beads on her juzu,20 saying blessings for those poor high school girls and the perverts and all the beings who are suffering in the world. She’s a nun, so that’s her job. I swear, sometimes I think the main reason she’s still alive is because of all the stuff I give her to pray about.
I asked her once why she liked to hear stories like this, and she explained to me that when she got ordained, she shaved her head and took some vows to be a bosatsu.21 One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first. It’s kind of like letting everybody else get into the elevator ahead of you. When you calculate all the beings on this earth at any time, and then add in the ones that are getting born every second and the ones that have already died—and not just human beings, either, but all the animals and other life-forms like amoebas and viruses and maybe even plants that have ever lived or ever will live, as well as all the extinct species—well, you can see that enlightenment will take a very long time. And what if the elevator gets full and the doors slam shut and you’re still standing outside?
When I asked Granny about this, she rubbed her shiny bald head and said, “Soo desu ne. It is a very big elevator . . .”
“But Granny, it’s going to take forever!”
“Well, we must try even harder, then.”
“We?!”
“Of course, dear Nao. You must help me.”
“No way!” I told Granny. “Forget it! I’m no fucking bosatsu . . .”
But she just smacked her lips and clicked her juzu beads, and the way she looked at me through those thick black-framed glasses of hers, I think maybe she was saying a blessing for me just then, too. I didn’t mind. It made me feel safe, like I knew no matter what happened, Granny was going to make sure I got onto that elevator.
You know what? Just this second, as I was writing this, I realized something. I never asked her where that elevator is going. I’m going to text her now and ask. I’ll let you know what she says.
3.
Okay, so now I really am going to tell you about the fascinating life of Yasutani Jiko, the famous anarchist-feminist-novelist-turned-Buddhist-nun of the Taisho era, but first I need to explain about this book you’re holding.22 You’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t look like an ordinary schoolgirl’s pure diary with puffy marshmallow animals on a shiny pink cover, and a heart-shaped lock, and a little golden key. And when you first picked it up, you probably didn’t think, Oh, here’s a nice pure diary written by an interesting Japanese schoolgirl. Gee, I think I’ll read that! because when you picked it up, you thought it was a philosophical masterpiece called À la recherche du temps perdu by the famo
us French author named Marcel Proust, and not an insignificant diary by a nobody named Nao Yasutani. So it just goes to show that it’s true what they say: You can’t tell a book by its cover!23
I hope you’re not too disappointed. What happened is that Marcel Proust’s book got hacked, only I didn’t do it. I bought it this way, prehacked, at a little handicraft boutique over in Harajuku24 where they sell one-of-a-kind DIY goods like crochet scarves and keitai pouches and beaded cuffs and other cool stuff. Handicraft is a superbig fad in Japan, and everyone is knitting and beading and crocheting and making pepakura,25 but I’m quite clumsy so I have to buy my DIY goods if I want to keep up with the trend. The girl who makes these diaries is a superfamous crafter, who buys containerloads of old books from all over the world, and then neatly cuts out all the printed pages and puts in blank paper instead. She does it so authentically you don’t even notice the hack, and you almost think that the letters just slipped off the pages and fell to the floor like a pile of dead ants.
Recently some nasty stuff has been happening in my life, and the day I bought the diary, I was skipping school and feeling especially blue, so I decided to go shopping in Harajuku to cheer myself up. When I saw these old books on the shelf, I thought they were a shop display so I didn’t pay any attention to them, but when the salesgirl pointed out the hack to me, of course I had to have one immediately. And they weren’t cheap, either, but I loved the worn feeling of the cover, and I could tell it would feel so good to write inside, like a real published book. But best of all, I knew it would be an excellent security feature.