A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  When she had related this to Oliver, he supplied a theory. “I think two things are happening. The cornmeal is simply food, which the clams ingest and which cleanses the green stuff from their digestive tracts and intestinal organs.”

  Ruth had been dicing potatoes for the chowder at the time he was explaining this. As she wielded the knife and listened, she could clearly see the image of the mother in the novel. She was wearing a long dress made of fine white linen. Her clams would not have green stuff in their intestines.

  “That’s the first process,” Oliver was saying. “It’s biological. The second process is electrochemical. Saltwater is an ionic solution and functions as an electrolyte. The rusty nail, which is made of iron, acts as a conductor, and I imagine the bodies of the clams do, too.”

  Actually, it probably was the Hamptons, Ruth was thinking. There were sand dunes and Atlantic breezes, green-and-white-striped awnings and canvas-covered deck chairs. The mother wore a white dress that billowed in the afternoon breeze, or perhaps she was in shorts, and the gauzy curtains in the tall open windows of the house were what billowed.

  “When you introduce the nail into the saltwater,” Oliver said, “it generates a small electrical charge, which is just enough to irritate the clams and cause them to purge the sand.”

  But then again, maybe she’d conflated the scene from the novel with something else. Maybe the beautiful blond mother in the billowing white dress didn’t put the rusty nail in the bucket with the clams. It didn’t sound like something she’d do. Maybe the nail in the bucket was a Japanese trick that Ruth had picked up from her own mother or from one of her Japanese friends.

  “So basically,” Oliver had concluded, “you’re simultaneously feeding them and electrocuting them to make them shit and spit.”

  Ruth, who was by this time chopping onions, wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “Actually,” she said, “the novel was more about the family—tall cool drinks and tennis whites and human relationships, that sort of thing. It didn’t go into a lot of detail about the electrochemistry.”

  They ate in the living room in front of the fire and listened to the wind howl. It was too cold to wear billowing white dresses here, and besides, people in the Pacific Northwest wore practical clothes, polypropylene and synthetic fleece, but Ruth couldn’t complain. The fire was nice and the chowder was delicious, rich and creamy. Whatever its origin or explanation, the technique for purging the bivalves worked, and the clams were both plump and free of grit and sand. The cat liked the chowder, too. He’d been circling around all during their meal, trying to lick their soup bowls. When Oliver shooed him away, the cat took a swipe at his hand, so Oliver grabbed him and pinned his head to the ground. Subdued but offended, Pesto had turned his back to them, shunning them, and now he stared moodily into the fire.

  “This sucks,” Oliver said. “I can download Yure Kuru, but it only works off data from the Japan Meteorological Agency. It won’t tell us anything about earthquakes in Canada.”

  Ruth stared into the flames. “I thought Canada was safe.”

  “No place is safe,” Oliver said. “Okay, I’ve got it. Now we’ll know all about seismic activity in Japan.”

  “Maybe we should go to Japan so you can use the app.”

  “Maybe we don’t have to, since Japan is coming here.”

  5.

  “What?”

  “Japan is coming here.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The earthquake,” Oliver said. “It moved the coast of Japan closer to us.”

  “Really?”

  Oliver looked puzzled. “Don’t you remember? The release of subduction caused the landmass near the epicenter to jump about thirteen feet in our direction.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, you did. We talked about it. It also caused the planet’s mass to shift closer to the core, which made the earth spin faster. The increase in the speed of rotation shortened the length of the day. Our days are shorter now.”

  “They are? That’s terrible!”

  He smiled. “You sound just like your mother . . .”

  She ignored his comment. “How much time did we lose?”

  “Not much. One point eight millionth of a second a day, I think it was. Do you want me to look it up?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “I’m sure we talked about this,” Oliver said. “It was all over the Internet. Don’t you remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” she lied. “I thought the days seemed awfully short. I figured it was my imagination.”

  Nao

  1.

  By the end of the summer, with Jiko’s help, I was getting stronger. Not just strong in my body, but strong in my mind. In my mind, I was becoming a superhero, like Jubei-chan, the Samurai Girl, only I was Nattchan, the Super Nun, with abilities bestowed upon me by Lord Buddha that included battling the waves, even if I always lost, and being able to withstand astonishing amounts of pain and hardship. Jiko was helping me cultivate my supapawa! by encouraging me to sit zazen for many hours without moving, and showing me how not to kill anything, not even the mosquitoes that buzzed around my face when I was sitting in the hondo at dusk or lying in bed at night. I learned not to swat them even when they bit me and also not to scratch the itch that followed. At first, when I woke up, my face and arms were swollen from the bites, but little by little, my blood and skin grew tough and immune to their poison and I didn’t break out in bumps no matter how much I’d been bitten. And soon there was no difference between me and the mosquitoes. My skin was no longer a wall that separated us, and my blood was their blood. I was pretty proud of myself, so I went and found Jiko and I told her. She smiled.

  “Yes,” she said, patting me on the arm. “Plenty of good food for mosquitoes.”

  She explained to me that young people need lots of exercise and that we should exhaust ourselves on a daily basis or else we would have troublesome thoughts and dreams, which would result in troublesome actions. I knew enough about young people’s troublesome actions to agree with her, so I didn’t mind that every day she made me work in the kitchen with Muji. I know Muji was happy to have me there, because she told me so. Before I came, there was too much work for a single nun to do. I’ve probably said this before, but the thing you have to realize about temple life is that it’s like living in a whole different era, and everything takes about a hundred times longer than it does in the twenty-first century. Muji and Jiko never waste anything. Every rubber band or twist-tie, every piece of string or paper or scrap of fabric, they carefully collect and reuse. Muji has a thing for plastic bags and she would make me wash them carefully with soap and water and hang them outside, where they would catch the sunlight and spin in the wind like jellyfish balloons as they dried. I didn’t mind, because I didn’t have much else to do, but in my opinion, it took way too long. I tried to explain that it would be quicker and easier just to throw the old bags away and buy new ones, and then they would have more time for zazen, but Jiko disagreed. Sitting zazen, washing freezer bags, same thing, she said.

  The only time they ever throw anything away is when it’s really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.

  So you can see how, with all this extra work, having an extra young person around really helps, and we were able to pickle more plums and cabbages, and dry more gourds and daikons, and take better care of the temple garden. We were able to visit many parishioners who were old or sick, and sometimes when we visited them, I weeded their gardens, too.

  I started getting up at five in the morning to sit zazen with them, and after the offerings and service and
soji,121 while Muji was cooking breakfast, Jiko would make me run all the way down the mountain to the road and then all the way up to the temple again. She would be there to meet me as I came panting up the last few steps, my legs like noodles. She’d be standing there with Chibi, the little black-and-white temple cat, and she would hand me a towel and a big jar full of cold water, and she’d watch me as I drank it down.

  “You have good straight legs,” she said once. “Nice and long. Strong.”

  I was pleased and would have blushed if my face wasn’t already red from running.

  “They are your father’s legs,” she continued. “He was a strong runner, too. Just a little faster than you.”

  “You made him run up and down, too?”

  “Of course. He was a young boy with many troublesome thoughts. He needed lots of exercise.”

  I poured the remaining water from the jar over my head and then shook it. Water drops flew from the tips of my hair, showering Chibi, who jumped and moved away.

  “I’m sorry, Chibi!” I cried, but of course he ignored me. He sat at a distance with his back turned and started licking himself. He seemed really offended, but he’s a cat so I didn’t take it personally.

  “Dad still has troublesome thoughts,” I said, watching the cat ignore me. “Maybe he should come back and live here with us. Maybe you could train him and teach him to be strong again. He could run up and down, and do zazen, and work in the garden . . .”

  The more I thought about it, the better my idea seemed, and before I knew it, the words were just falling out of my mouth. Please, Granny! I said. I’m serious. He needs help! And then I told her all about the night he fell in front of the train, and how he and Mom were pretending it was an accident but it wasn’t, and about how he never left the apartment during the day, but went out late at night and stayed out for hours and hours, and I knew because I stayed up and listened for him because I was afraid he wouldn’t come back. And how one night, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I snuck out after him, because I needed to know if he was stalking someone or going to meet a lover, which would kind of suck for Mom, but at least would give him a raison d’être, and I followed him through the streets, staying in the shadows and keeping close to the walls. The route he walked made no sense, but he didn’t care, like he was a robot and his feet had been programmed to execute the kind of random algorithm we learned about in computing class, but his mind had been turned off so he didn’t notice where he was going. Maybe he was sleepwalking. Sometimes he entered different neighborhoods, and sometimes the streets got so old and narrow and twisting I was sure we were lost. He never stopped or spoke to anyone or bought anything, not even cigarettes or beer from a vending machine, and now that I think of it, we never passed anyone on the streets either, so maybe he had an avoidance algorithm built into his program, the way some robots do so they don’t bump into things.

  We walked for hours. I was scared because I knew I’d never find my way back home alone, and I didn’t want him to know I’d been following, but I was too tired to keep up. And just then he made one last turn, and we came out into the same small park on the bank of the Sumida River that I’d seen in my bed in my metal-bound dream. It was exactly like I pictured it. Off to one side, next to the riverbank, there was a playground area with a swing set and a slide and a teeter totter, and I knew that’s where he was headed. And sure enough, he walked straight over to the swing set and sat down. He had his back to me, so I went around and hid behind a cement panda where I could see his face. He lit a Short Hope and began to swing. He was facing the water, and he started pumping his legs and swinging higher and higher, with his cigarette clenched between his teeth, grinning like he really meant business. It looked like he was trying to get that swing going as high as he could so that when it reached the top of its arc and he let go, the momentum of his swinging would send him sailing over the low safety wall and into the Sumida River, where he would drown and his body would sink to the bottom and get eaten by a kappa or a giant river catfish. I swear, I could see it, the moment when his hands slipped from the chain and his body shot out of the seat, flying forward, his arms and legs spread wide to hug the oncoming air and the dark, deep water. No . . . no . . . no! I heard myself whispering, and my heart was beating in time to the swinging. Now . . . now . . . now!

  But it never happened. He never let go, and then slowly his pumping lost its power and the arc of the swing grew smaller and more uneven, until he was barely moving at all, and the toes of his plastic sandals were just dragging backward and forward, tracing small aimless circles in the dust under the swing. He stood up and walked to the safety wall and looked over, and then he took one last drag from his cigarette and flicked it into the river. He stood there for a long time, staring into the oily water. I was afraid he was going to climb over then and jump. I wanted to run out from my hiding place and stop him.

  “But you didn’t,” Jiko said.

  “No. I was going to, but then he turned away from the water and started walking again.”

  “Did you follow?”

  “Yes. He walked home. I waited outside the door of our apartment until I thought it was safe and then let myself back in with my key. I don’t think he heard me. He was snoring by then.”

  Old Jiko nodded. “He was a good sleeper as a boy.”

  “So don’t you think he should come back and stay here with us?” I asked. “I think it would do him a lot of good, don’t you? You should have seen his face when we were walking up the steps to the temple. He looked really happy.”

  “He always liked it here,” Jiko said.

  “So he should come back, right?”

  “Maa, soo kashira,”122 she said, which is one of those Japanese answers that mean absolutely nothing.

  2.

  By August, it was hotter than you can imagine, and in the afternoon, when Jiko and Muji were teaching flower arrangement or sutra singing to the neighborhood ladies and I was supposed to be doing my summer homework, I would drag myself out onto the engawa123 that overlooked the pond and sit there and zone out. I liked to lean up against the thick wooden beam with my headphones on, and my legs sprawled out in front of me, watching the dragonflies flit around the lotus pads in the tiny pond, and listening to Japanese pop covers of French chansons that I was into even back then before I knew about À la recherche du temps perdu. Jiko didn’t like it when I sprawled, and when she caught me doing it she told me so. She said it wasn’t good manners to sit with my legs spread wide open for all the world to see, especially when I wasn’t wearing any panties, and generally I agreed with her, but it was so hot! I just couldn’t stand the feeling of the skin on the insides of my legs touching, and the old wood of the engawa was smooth and cool, and nobody was watching. Even Chibi the cat, who normally loved hot laps, stayed away. He was passed out on a cool mossy rock underneath some ferns. Mostly the air was dead still, but sometimes the tiniest breezes blew up the side of the mountain and entered the temple gates and found their way into the garden, where they ruffled the surface of the water and tickled up between my legs, making me shiver. Sometimes I think that the spirits of the ancestors live in the breezes, and you can feel them swishing around.

  It was coming up to Obon, and spirits were cruising about like travelers arriving at the airport with their suitcases, looking for a place to check in. Obon was their summer vacation, too, when they could come back from the land of the dead to visit us here, in the land of the so-called living. The hot air felt pregnant with ghosts, which is a funny thing for me to say, since I’ve never been pregnant, but I’ve seen women on the train who are about to pop, and I imagine it must feel like this. They heave themselves around, belly first, and if someone is nice enough to give them a seat, they plop down, and then they just sit there with their legs open, rubbing their bellies and fanning their sweaty red faces, which is just how August feels, as Obon approaches, like the whole round world is pregnant with ghosts, and at any moment the dead will burst through the invis
ible membrane that separates them from us.

  When I wasn’t sitting on the veranda, zoning out, I was following Jiko around the temple, carrying stuff for her and bugging her with questions about our ancestors.

  “How about Grandma Ema? Is she coming? Did I ever meet her? I’d like to meet her. How about Great-Aunt Sugako and Great-Uncle Haruki? I’d like to meet them, too. Do you think they might want to meet me?”

  I was excited because even though none of my dead relatives had ever bothered to show up for Obon before, at least to my knowledge, I had a feeling that this year would be different. First of all, I was an ikisudama now, and as a living ghost, I figured the dead ghosts would feel more comfortable with me. And I figured, too, that they would be more likely to come here to Jiko’s temple, where everyone was expecting them and knew how to treat them properly, than to Sunnyvale, say, where the neighbors would simply freak and treat them like tacky Halloween spooks. It’s like a birthday party. If you have parents like Kayla’s who are really awesome event planners and take everybody bowling or rock climbing, then it’s great to be the birthday girl, but if you have parents like mine who are pretty clueless, then birthdays suck, and really you’d rather be a thousand miles away than stuck there at your boring little party with your American friends who keep sighing and rolling their eyes at each other and then going all gushy and fake whenever your mom walks into the room with another plate of sushi. And you pretend you’re having a good time, too, smiling like a crazy person, but you know it’s a sales job, and you’re only doing it to make your parents happy, and because it’s good for their self-esteem. Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that if you were a ghost, which party would you rather go to?