A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  Haruki #1?

  3.

  She searched the Internet for Haruki Yasutani, cross-referencing his name with every search term she could recall from Nao’s diary: sky, soldier, kamikaze, philosophy, French poetry, Tokyo University. No luck. She moved on to the second Haruki, inputting new keywords: computer programmer, origami, Sunnyvale, but although she came up with a few Yasutanis, a couple of Harukis, and a handful of tech industry people with one of those names, she found none with both names, and none who appeared to be related to either the kamikaze pilot or his nephew, Nao’s father.

  Frustrating. She went back to the tsunami People Finder and looked up Haruki and Tomoko, but neither was listed among the missing and dead Yasutanis. That was a relief. She moved on, searching for Zen temples in northern Japan, but she had little to go on, since she didn’t know where in the north the temple was located, or even to which sect of Zen it belonged. She tried adding the name Jiko Yasutani to the temple search, along with terms like anarchist, feminist, novelist, and nun, in various combinations. Nothing. She looked for temples up north that had been destroyed in the tsunami. There were several of these. Other temples had survived and were spearheading relief efforts.

  The hands on the sky soldier watch circled the face, but she ignored them and read on, digging through articles posted back in 2011, in the months just after March 11. Crackpot religious leaders were blaming the earthquake on angry gods who were punishing the Japanese for everything, from their materialism and worship of technology to their dependence on nuclear power and reckless slaughter of whales. Angry parents in Fukushima were demanding to know why the government wasn’t doing anything to protect their children from radiation. The government was responding by fiddling with the numbers and raising the levels of permissible exposure; meanwhile, nuclear plant workers, battling the meltdown at Fukushima, were dropping dead. A group calling themselves the Senior Certain Death Squad,54 made up of retired engineers in their seventies and eighties, volunteered to replace the younger workers. The suicide rate among people displaced by the fallout and tsunami was on the rise. She typed certain death and suicide and then remembered the train. She entered Chuo Rapid Express, and finally Harryki, which in her hurry she mistyped, the forefinger of her left hand holding the r down too long, and her right finger overreaching the u and striking the y instead, but before she could correct her mistakes, her pinky hit ENTER.

  She groaned as the wheel on the search engine spun, and then gasped as she stared at the results.

  4.

  The website belonged to a professor of psychology at Stanford University, a Dr. Rongstad Leistiko. Dr. Leistiko was doing research on first-person narratives of suicide and self-killing. He had posted an excerpt from a letter, written to him by one of his informants, a man by the name of “Harry.” The excerpt read as follows:

  Suicide is a very deep subject, but since you are interested, I will try to explain my thoughts to you.

  Throughout history, we Japanese have always appreciated suicide. For us it is a beautiful thing that gives meaning and shape and honor to our lives forever. It is a method to make our feeling of alive most real. For many thousands of years this is our tradition.

  Because, you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience. Even although life is a thing that seems to have some kind of weight and shape, this is only an illusion. Our feeling of alive has no real edge or boundary. So we Japanese people say that our life sometimes feels unreal, just like a dream.

  Death is certain. Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind. So making a suicide is finding the edge of life. It stops life in time, so we can grasp what shape it is and feel it is real, at least for just a moment. It is trying to make some real solid thing from the flow of life that is always changing.

  Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Even Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.

  Maybe you would like to ask me how does suicide make life feel real?

  Well, by cutting into illusions. By cutting into pixels and finding blood. By entering the cave of mind and walking into fire. By making shadows bleed. You can feel life completely by taking it away.

  Suicide feels like One Authentic Thing.

  Suicide feels like Meaning of Life.

  Suicide feels like having the Last Word.

  Suicide feels like stopping Time Forever.

  But of course this is all just delusion, too! Suicide is just part of life, so it is part of the delusion.

  Nowadays in Japan, because of Economic Recession and downsizing, suicide is very popular, especially for middle-age salarymen like myself. They get downsized from their company and cannot support their family. Sometimes they have much debt. They cannot tell their wife, so they sit on the park bench everyday like gomi. Do you know gomi? It means garbage, the kind to throw away and not even to recycle. Men are scared and feel ashamed like gomi. It is a sad situation.

  As for methods, there are many. Hanging is one, and the most popular place for hanging suicide is near Mt. Fuji, in Aokigahara Woods. This place has the nickname “Suicide Forest” because of so many salarymen hanging from the branches in the sea of trees.

  Some other methods are:

  1. Jumping off train platform in front of the train (Chuo Rapid Express is popular one)

  2. Jumping off roof

  3. Charcoal briquette method

  4. Detergent suicide method

  There are many popular suicide movies and also books that teach about how to do these methods. Personally I have tried the train platform method, but I was a failure. Youngsters prefer #2 jumping off roof method, and sometimes they like like to do it with each other while holding hands. Unfortunately, suicide is popular with the youngsters, especially elementary and junior high school students, because of academic pressure and bullying. I worry because my daughter is a youngster and not happy in her Japanese school.

  Recently there is a fad of suicide clubs as you may have heard. People can find each other on the Internet and chat about how to make a suicide. They can discuss some method and customize it as they like, for example what kind of music is suited for the soundtrack to their dying? Then, if they can find some friends they feel harmony with, they can make a plan. They will meet somewhere, for example at the train station or in front of a department store or on some park bench. Maybe they will carry something so they will know each other? Or maybe they will wear something special? Then they will text to each other until their eyes meet, and this is how they can recognize each other.

  Many club members prefer #3—charcoal briquette method. To do this method, they must rent an automobile together and drive to the countryside. Then they can put some nice music on the CD player and listen to it while dying from CO2 gas.

  Most of the time they like to listen to sad songs about love.

  Car rental is expensive in Japan, and many suicide people do not have much money because of downsizing and bankruptcy, etc., so it is more economical to have more members. This is why sometimes the police can find five or six bodies in one car.

  Every time I read about this method, I remember the day you took me shopping at The Home Depot store. Do you remember this time? You introduced me to the Weber BBQ grill and the mesquite flavor briquette? Sadly, I cannot find the mesquite flavor briquette in Tokyo, and Weber BBQ grill is not so popular here either.

  Sometimes I think American people cannot ever understand why a Japanese would like to make a suicide. American people have a strong sense of their own importance. They believe in individual self, and also they have their God to tell them suicide is wrong. This is so simple! It must be nice to believe something simple like that. Recently I am reading some philosophica
l books written by great Western minds all about the meaning of life. These are very interesting, and I hope I will find some good answers there.

  I don’t care for myself, but I am afraid my attitude is unhealthy for my daughter. At first I thought I should commit suicide so she will not feel shame on account of my failure to find a good job with big salary, but after I tried #1 method, I could see so much sadness on her face that I changed my mind.

  Now I think I must try to stay alive, but I have no confidence to do so. Please teach me a simple American way to love my life so I do not have to think of suicide ever again. I want to find the meaning of my life for my daughter.

  Sincerely,

  “Harry”

  5.

  Dear Professor Leistiko,

  I am writing to you about a matter of some urgency. I am a novelist, and recently, while doing research on the subject of suicide in Japan for a project I’m working on, I happened upon your website and your research on first-person narratives of suicide and self-killing. I read with great interest the very moving letter written by the informant named “Harry,” and I am writing to inquire about his identity. By any chance, is this “Harry” a Japanese computer engineer named Haruki Yasutani, who once lived in Sunnyvale, California, and worked in Silicon Valley during the dot-com days?

  I realize that this request may sound irregular and there will no doubt be issues of confidentiality involved, but I am trying to get in touch with Mr. Yasutani or his daughter, Naoko. Some items, including letters and a diary, which I believe belong to the daughter, have come into my possession by somewhat mysterious means, and I am concerned about her well-being and would like to return them to her as soon as possible.

  If there is any other information I can provide, I will gladly do so. I have been writer-in-residence in the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford in the past, and I am sure that Professor P-L, or any member of that faculty, would be happy to vouch for me. I hope you will contact me at your earliest convenience.

  Very sincerely yours,

  etc.

  She sent off the email, sat back in her chair, and glanced at the sky soldier watch, which was sitting on top of her untouched manuscript where she had abandoned it hours earlier. Her heart sank. It was after one, and the entire morning had vanished. And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, she heard the sound of tires, rolling up the driveway.

  6.

  Time interacts with attention in funny ways.

  At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day.

  At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water.

  There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

  This blissful state was one that Ruth seemed to recall enjoying, once upon a time, when she’d been writing well. Now, no matter how hard she tried, that Eden eluded her. The spring had dried up, the pool was clogged and stagnant. She blamed the Internet. She blamed her hormones. She blamed her DNA. She pored over websites, collecting information on ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, parasites, and even sleeping sickness, but her biggest fear was Alzheimer’s. She’d watched her mother’s mind dwindle, and she was familiar with the corrosive effect that plaque can have on brain function. Like her mother, Ruth often forgot things. She perseverated. Lost words. Slipped in and out of time.

  The car belonged to Muriel, and now she and Oliver were sitting in the kitchen, having tea and talking about garbage. Ruth, who had gone downstairs to be polite, sat between them, mildly bored, listening to their conversation and fingering the stack of letters from the Hello Kitty lunchbox. On the table, next to the lunchbox, sat a battered tube of Lion Brand Japanese toothpaste, the excuse for Muriel’s drop-in. She’d found it on the beach washed up below Jap Ranch and brought it right over.

  Ruth disliked drop-ins. When she first moved to the island, she was astonished that people would just drive on in for a visit without calling or emailing first. Oliver found the custom even more unsettling than she did, and once he had even hidden in an old refrigerator box in the basement when he heard the sound of tires coming up the gravel, but the tactic hadn’t worked. The guests had just let themselves into the house and sat down at the kitchen table to wait, and when Ruth returned from her errands, she found them there. She offered them tea and wondered out loud where Oliver was.

  “Oh, he’s not here,” they told her.

  They chatted and sipped their tea while Ruth tried to ascertain the purpose of the visit. A while later, she heard a furtive sound in the basement, and then Oliver appeared at the door.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, suspicious and annoyed that he’d stayed away for so long, leaving her to deal with the situation.

  “Oh, out. In the forest,” he said, brushing cobwebs from his hair.

  Eventually the guests left, and she pressed him, and finally he confessed.

  “You mean you were just sitting down there?” she asked.

  He nodded, looking a little sheepish.

  “In the box? The whole time?”

  “It wasn’t that long.”

  “It was hours! What were you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Were you listening to us?”

  “A little. I couldn’t really hear.”

  “So what were you doing?”

  He shook his head, managing to look both bewildered and a little bit smug. “Nothing,” he said. “I was just sitting there. It was nice. And cool. I took a nap.”

  She really wanted to be mad, but she couldn’t be. It was just his nature, and so she laughed instead. Relieved, he laughed, too.

  It was his nature, just as drop-ins were a part of the nature of the island. However odd and unnerving the custom might be, when guests showed up, you invited them in for tea.

  The discovery of a tube of Lion Brand toothpaste was interesting, and it was kind of Muriel to share it, but the conversation had turned to the half-life of plastic in a gyre, which Ruth found tedious, so she turned her attention to the letters. She spread the pages out on the table, unfolding each one and peering at the inscrutable kanji. At the very least, she might be able to decipher an address. Even the name of a prefecture would help. Oliver and Muriel talked on, although it was not quite a conversation they were having, Ruth noticed. Rather, their exchange sounded more like a session at an academic conference, two professors taking turns at the podium presenting information that they both knew, and more or less already agreed with.

  “Plastic is like that,” Oliver was saying. “It never biodegrades. It gets churned around in the gyre and ground down into particles. Oceanographers call it confetti. In a granular state, it hangs around forever.”

  “The sea is filled with plastic confetti,” Muriel affirmed. “It floats around and gets eaten by the fishes or spat up onto the beach. It’s in our food chain. I don’t envy the anthropologists, trying to make sense of our material culture from all the bright hard nuggets they’ll be digging out of the middens of the future.”

  The last letter was thicker than the others. It was wrapped in a packet made of several layers of oily waxed paper. Carefully Ruth unpeeled it, laying the sticky paper to one side. Tucked inside and folded into quarters was a thin composition book, the kind a student might once have used in university to write an essay exam. She unfolded it and looked inside, expecting to see more of the cursive Japanese script, but to her surprise, the alphabet was Roman and the language was French.

  It was Oliver’s turn. “Anthropologists of the future—” he had started to say, when Rut
h interrupted.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I hate to change the subject, but does anyone read French?”

  7.

  She showed them the composition book and they took turns trying to read it, but they didn’t get far.

  “So much for bilingual education,” Muriel said. She glanced at her watch, put her reading glasses away, and started gathering up her things. “Try calling Benoit.”

  Ruth didn’t know Benoit.

  “Benoit LeBec,” Muriel said. “He’s the dump guy, Québécois, goes to A, drives the forklift . . .”

  “A?”

  “AA,” Muriel said. “But nothing’s anonymous on this island, so they just call it A. His wife works at the school, and I know he’s a big reader. His parents were literature professors.”

  She reached for the mangled tube of Lion Brand toothpaste that lay next to the barnacle-covered freezer bag.

  “Have you called Callie about that yet?” Muriel asked, pointing to the bag, which had begun to off-gas as the barnacles slowly died.

  “No,” Ruth said, ruefully. She’d meant to, but she was finding it harder and harder to pick up the phone these days. She didn’t like talking to people in real time anymore.

  “Well, I happen to know she just got back from a cruise and she’s on-island for a while. You might want to call her before these guys get too much more dead.”

  Ruth felt a stab of remorse. “Should we have tried to keep them alive? I never thought . . .”

  Muriel shrugged and stood. “Probably doesn’t matter, but call her anyway. She might be able to tell you something.” She’d changed her mind and left her toothpaste on the table, and now she waved her hand somewhat magisterially in its direction. “I’ll leave that with you, then,” she said. “Curatorially speaking, I feel it’s a collection and should all stay together.”

  They walked her out to her car. Today Muriel was wearing a ratty men’s cardigan sweater over her long skirt and gum boots, and as Ruth watched her struggle to lever her body down the porch steps, she thought about Nao’s description of the old ladies in the baths, how they came in so many shapes and sizes. Ruth was feeling her age too, in her knees, in her hips. In New York, she’d walked everywhere and never had a problem getting enough exercise. Here on the island, she mostly drove. She thought about her old neighborhood in the East Village, the coffee shops, the restaurants, the bookstores, the park. Her life in New York still felt so vivid and real. Like Nao’s Sunnyvale.