A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had this problem of people beating you up and stealing things from you and using them against you, but if you have, then you’ll understand that this book was total genius, in case one of my stupid classmates decided to casually pick up my diary and read it and post it to the Internet or something. But who would pick up an old book called À la recherche du temps perdu, right? My stupid classmates would just think it was homework for juku.26 They wouldn’t even know what it meant.

  Actually, I didn’t know what it meant either, since my ability to speak French is nonexistent. There were a bunch of books with different titles for sale. Some of them were in English, like Great Expectations and Gulliver’s Travels, which were okay, but I thought it would be better to buy a title I couldn’t read, since knowing the meaning might possibly interfere with my own creative expression. There were others in different languages, too, like German and Russian and even Chinese, but I ended up choosing À la recherche du temps perdu because I figured it was probably French, and French is cool and has a sophisticated feeling, and besides, this book is exactly the right size to fit into my handbag.

  4.

  The minute I bought the book, of course, I wanted to start writing in it, so I went to a nearby kissa27 and ordered a Blue Mountain, then I took out my favorite purple gel ink pen and opened the book to the first creamy page. I took a bitter sip and waited for the words to come. I waited and waited, and sipped some more coffee, and waited some more. Nothing. I’m pretty chatty, as you can probably tell, and usually I don’t have any trouble coming up with stuff to say. But this time, even though I had a lot on my mind, the words didn’t come. It was weird, but I figured I was just feeling intimidated by the new-old book and would eventually get over it. So I drank the rest of my coffee and read a couple of manga, and when it was time for school to let out, I went home.

  But the next day I tried again, and the same thing happened. And after that, every time I took out the book, I’d stare at the title and start to wonder. I mean, Marcel Proust must be pretty important if even someone like me had heard of him, even if I didn’t know who he was at first and thought he was a celebrity chef or a French fashion designer. What if his ghost was still clinging to the inside of the covers and was pissed off at the hack the crafty girl had done, cutting out his words and pages? And what if now the ghost was preventing me from using his famous book to write about typical dumb schoolgirl stuff, like my crushes on boys (not that I have any), or new fashions I want (my desires are endless), or my fat thighs (actually my thighs are fine, it’s my knees I hate). You really can’t blame old Marcel’s ghost for getting righteously pissed off, thinking I might be dumb enough to write this kind of stupid crap inside his important book.

  And even if his ghost didn’t mind, I still wouldn’t want to use his book for such trivial stuff, even if these weren’t my last days on earth. But since these are my last days on earth, I want to write something important, too. Well, maybe not important, because I don’t know anything important, but something worthwhile. I want to leave something real behind.

  But what can I write about that’s real? Sure, I can write about all the bad shit that’s happened to me, and my feelings about my dad and my mom and my so-called friends, but I don’t particularly want to. Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I’m just wasting my time, and I’m not the only one. Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy.

  And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?

  And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.

  5.

  So anyway, these distracting thoughts about ghosts and time kept drifting through my mind every time I tried to write in old Marcel’s book, until finally I decided that I had to know what the title meant. I asked Babette, but she couldn’t help me because of course she’s not a real French maid, just a high school dropout from Chiba prefecture, and the only French she knows is a couple of sexy phrases she picked up from this farty old French professor she was dating for a while. So when I got home that night, I googled Marcel Proust and learned that À la recherche du temps perdu means “In search of lost time.”

  Weird, right? I mean, there I was, sitting in a French maid café in Akiba, thinking about lost time, and old Marcel Proust was sitting in France a hundred years ago, writing a whole book about the exact same subject. So maybe his ghost was lingering between the covers and hacking into my mind, or maybe it was just a crazy coincidence, but either way, how cool is that? I think coincidences are cool, even if they don’t mean anything, and who knows? Maybe they do! I’m not saying everything happens for a reason. It was more just that it felt as if me and old Marcel were on the same wavelength.

  The next day I went back to Fifi’s and ordered a small pot of lapsang souchong, which I drink sometimes as a break from Blue Mountain, and as I sat there, sipping the smoky tea and nibbling a French pastry, waiting for Babette to set me up on a date, I started to wonder.

  How do you search for lost time, anyway? It’s an interesting question, so I texted it to old Jiko, which is what I always do when I have a philosophical dilemma. And then I had to wait for a really, really long time, but finally my keitai gave a little ping that tells me she’s texted me back. And what she wrote was this:

  28

  which means something like this:

  For the time being,

  Words scatter . . .

  Are they fallen leaves?

  I’m not very good at poetry, but when I read old Jiko’s poem, I saw an image in my mind of this big old ginkgo tree on the grounds of her temple.29 The leaves are shaped like little green fans, and in the autumn they turn bright yellow and fall off and cover the ground, painting everything pure golden. And it occurred to me that the big old tree is a time being, and Jiko is a time being, too, and I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree, sifting through the fallen leaves that are her scattered golden words.

  The idea of the time being comes from a book called Shōbōgenzō that an ancient Zen master named Dōgen Zenji wrote about eight hundred years ago, which makes him even older than old Jiko or even Marcel Proust. Dōgen Zenji is one of Jiko’s favorite authors, and he’s lucky because his books are important and still kicking around. Unfortunately, everything Jiko wrote is out of print so I’ve actually never read her words, but she’s told me lots of stories, and I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too, and that’s when the idea popped into my mind of using Marcel Proust’s important book to write down my old Jiko’s life.

  It’s not just because Jiko is the most important person I know, although that’s part of it. And it’s not just because she is incredibly old and was alive back when Marcel Proust was writing his book about time. Maybe she was, but that’s not why, either. The reason I decided to write about her in À la recherche du temps perdu is because she is the only person I know who really understands time.

  Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she’s just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she’ll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so you know she is telling you a joke. I mean, she understands perfectly well that time isn’t something you can spread out like butter or jam, and death isn’t going to hang around and wait for you to finish whatever you happen to be doing before it zaps you. That’s the joke, and she laughs because she knows it.

  But actually, I don’t think it’s very funny. Even though I don’t know old Jiko’s exact age, I do know for sure that pretty soon she’ll be dead even if she hasn’t finished sweeping out the temple kitchen or weeding the daikon patch or arranging fresh fl
owers on the altar, and once she’s dead, that will be the end of her, timewise. This doesn’t bother her at all, but it bothers me a lot. These are old Jiko’s last days on earth, and there’s nothing I can do about that, and there’s nothing I can do to stop time from passing or even to slow it down, and every second of the day is another second lost. She probably wouldn’t agree with me, but that’s how I see it.

  I don’t mind thinking of the world without me because I’m unexceptional, but I hate the idea of the world without old Jiko. She’s totally unique and special, like the last Galapagos tortoise or some other ancient animal hobbling around on the scorched earth, who is the only one left of its kind. But please don’t get me going on the topic of species extinction because it’s totally depressing, and I’ll have to commit suicide right this second.

  6.

  Okay, Nao. Why are you doing this? Like, what’s the point?

  This is a problem. The only reason I can think of for writing Jiko’s life story in this book is because I love her and want to remember her, but I’m not planning on sticking around for long, and I can’t remember her stories if I’m dead, right?

  And apart from me, who else would care? I mean, if I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I’d post her stories on a blog, but actually I stopped doing that a while ago. It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.30 And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting,31 it kind of broke my heart.

  The fact is, I don’t have much of a social network these days, and the people I hang out with aren’t the kind who care about a hundred-and-four-year-old Buddhist nun, even if she is a bosatsu who can use email and texting, and that’s only because I made her buy a computer so she could stay in touch with me when I’m in Tokyo and she’s at her falling-down old temple on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. She’s not crazy about new technology, but she does pretty well for a time being with cataracts and arthritis in both her thumbs. Old Jiko and Marcel Proust come from a prewired world, which is a time that’s totally lost these days.

  So here I am, at Fifi’s Lonely Apron, staring at all these blank pages and asking myself why I’m bothering, when suddenly an amazing idea knocks me over. Ready? Here it is:

  I will write down everything I know about Jiko’s life in Marcel’s book, and when I’m done, I’ll just leave it somewhere, and you will find it!

  How cool is that? It feels like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me!

  If you ask me, it’s fantastically cool and beautiful. It’s like a message in a bottle, cast out onto the ocean of time and space. Totally personal, and real, too, right out of old Jiko’s and Marcel’s prewired world. It’s the opposite of a blog. It’s an antiblog, because it’s meant for only one special person, and that person is you. And if you’ve read this far, you probably understand what I mean. Do you understand? Do you feel special yet?

  I’ll just wait here for a while to see if you answer . . .

  7.

  Just kidding. I know you can’t answer, and now I feel stupid, because what if you don’t feel special? I’m making an assumption, right? What if you just think I’m a jerk and toss me into the garbage, like all those young girls I tell old Jiko about, who get killed by perverts and chopped up and thrown into dumpsters, just because they’ve made the mistake of dating the wrong guy? That would be really sad and scary.

  Or, here’s another scary thought, what if you’re not reading this at all? What if you never even found this book, because somebody chucked it in the trash or recycled it before it got to you? Then old Jiko’s stories truly will be lost forever, and I’m just sitting here wasting time talking to the inside of a dumpster.

  Hey, answer me! Am I stuck inside of a garbage can, or not?

  Just kidding. Again.

  Okay, here’s what I’ve decided. I don’t mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting. And I don’t think old Jiko will mind, either, because being a Buddhist, she really understands impermanence and that everything changes and nothing lasts forever. Old Jiko really isn’t going to care if her life stories get written or lost, and maybe I’ve picked up a little of that laissez-faire attitude from her. When the time comes, I can just let it all go.

  Or not. I don’t know. Maybe by the time I’ve written the last page, I’ll be too embarrassed or ashamed to leave it lying around, and I’ll wimp out and destroy it instead.

  Hey, if you’re not reading this, you’ll know I’m a wimp! Ha-ha.

  And as for that business about old Marcel’s ghost being pissed off, I’ve decided not to worry about it. When I was googling Marcel Proust, I happened to look up his sales ranking on Amazon, and I couldn’t believe it but his books are all still in print, and depending on which edition of À la recherche du temps perdu you’re talking about, his ranking is somewhere between 13,695 and 79,324, which is no best seller, but it’s not so bad for a dead guy. Just so you know. You don’t have to feel too sorry for old Marcel.

  I don’t know how long this whole project is going to take me. Probably months. There are lots of blank pages, and Jiko’s got lots of stories, and I write pretty slow, but I’m going to work really hard, and probably by the time I’m done filling in the last page, old Jiko will be dead, and it will be my time, too.

  And I know I can’t possibly write down every detail about Jiko’s life, so if you want to learn more, you’ll have to read her books, if you can find them. Like I said before, her stuff is all out of print, and it’s possible that some crafty girl has already hacked her pages and tossed all her golden words into the recycling bin next to Proust’s. That would be really sad, because it’s not like old Jiko has any ranking on Amazon at all. I know because I checked and she isn’t even there. Hmm. I’m going to have to rethink this hacking concept. Maybe it’s not so cool after all.

  Ruth

  1.

  The cat had climbed up onto Ruth’s desk and was preparing to make a strategic incursion onto her lap. She’d been reading the diary when he approached from the side, placing his forepaws on her knees and nudging his nose underneath the spine of the book, pushing it up and out of his way. Once that was done, he settled himself on her lap and started kneading, butting his head into her hand. He was so annoying. Always looking for attention.

  She closed the diary and placed it on the desk as she stroked the cat’s forehead, but even after putting the book aside, she was aware of an odd and lingering sense of urgency to . . . what? To help the girl? To save her? Ridiculous.

  Her first impulse when she’d started the diary was to read quickly to the end, but the girl’s handwriting was often hard to decipher, and her sentences were peppered with slang and intriguing colloquialisms. It had been years since Ruth had lived in Japan, and while she still had a reasonable command of the spoken language, her vocabulary was out of date. In university, Ruth had studied the Japanese classics—The Tale of Genji, Noh drama, The Pillow Book—literature going back hundreds and even thousands of years, but she was only vaguely familiar with Japanese pop culture. Sometimes the girl made an effort to explain, but often she didn’t bother, so Ruth found herself logging on to the Internet to investigate and verify the girl’s references, and before long, she had dragged out her old kanji dictionary, and was translating and annotating and scribbling notes about Akiba and maid cafés, otaku and hentai. And then there was the anarchist feminist Zen Buddhist novelist nun.

  She leaned forward and did an Amazon search for Jiko Yasutani but, as Nao had warned, found nothing. She googled Nao Yasutani and again came up with nothing. The cat, irked by her restlessness and inattention, abandoned her lap. He didn’t like it when she went on the computer and used her fingers to type a
nd scroll instead of to scratch his head. It was a waste of two perfectly good hands as far as he was concerned, and so he went in search of Oliver.

  She had better luck with Dōgen, whose masterwork, Shōbōgenzō, or the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, did have an Amazon ranking, albeit nowhere near Proust’s. Of course, he’d lived in the early thirteenth century, so he was older than Proust by almost seven hundred years. When she searched for “time being,” she learned that the phrase was used in the English title of Chapter 11 of the Shōbōgenzō, and she was able to locate several translations, along with commentaries, online. The ancient Zen master had a nuanced and complex notion of time that she found poetic but somewhat opaque. Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.

  Ruth took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She took a sip of tea, her head so full of questions she barely noticed the tea had long grown cold. Who was this Nao Yasutani, and where was she now? While the girl hadn’t come right out and said she was going to commit suicide, she’d certainly implied as much. Was she sitting on the edge of a mattress somewhere, fingering a bottle of pills and a tall glass of water? Or had that hentai gotten to her first? Or perhaps she had decided not to kill herself, only to fall victim to the earthquake and tsunami instead, although that didn’t make a lot of sense. The tsunami was in Tohoku, in northern Japan. Nao was writing in a maid café in Tokyo. What was she doing at that maid café in the first place? Fifi’s? It sounded like a brothel.

  She sat back in her chair and gazed out the window at the tiny stretch of horizon that she could see through a gap in the tall trees. A pine tree is time, Dōgen had written, and bamboo is time. Mountains are time. Oceans are time . . . Dark clouds hung low in the sky, forming an almost indiscernible line where they met the still, dull sheen of the ocean. Gunmetal grey. On the far side of the Pacific lay the battered Japanese coastline. Entire towns had been crushed and dragged out to sea. If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated. Was the girl out there somewhere in all that water, her body decomposed by now, redistributed by the waves?