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Part I, Chapter 3: Nao
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Tale for the Time Being, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time, Impermanence, and the Present
The Difficulty of Communication
Life vs. Death
Coincidences and Connections
Sexual Perversion and Violence
Summary
Analysis
(1) As Ruth reads Nao’s diary, she can’t shake off the feeling that she wants to somehow help or save Nao. Ruth does an Amazon search for Jiko Yasutani but doesn’t find anything, just like Nao said. Ruth does, however, find Dogen’s book Shōbōgenzō, or the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. Ruth searches for the term “time being” on the internet and finds many translations and commentaries on the concept from Dogen’s book. Reading his words that “everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate,” she finds Dogen’s notion of time to be “poetic but opaque.”
Ruth feels an intimate connection with Nao and is very invested in her life and stories, just as Nao had hoped her reader would be. Ruth isn’t yet ready to completely accept Buddhist notions about time and spiritual connections between people, which is why she finds Dogen’s ideas to be “opaque.” However, her desire to help or save Nao illustrates Dogen’s claim that everything in the universe is “intimately linked”: Ruth feels a link to Nao, even though they are “separate” beings who inhabit separate moments in time.
Themes
Ruth is worried because Nao has implied that she will commit suicide. She wonders if Nao has already committed the deed, or if she changed her mind about it, only to fall victim to the earthquake and tsunami that came after. Ruth gazes out her window and looks out at the ocean, and she thinks about the destroyed Japanese coastline on the far side of the Pacific. She wonders if Nao is among the dead.
The tsunami is a symbol of powerful, destructive change in the novel. It illustrates how things can change without warning, and the idea that trying to escape change is pointless.
Themes
On Ruth’s desk, there’s a thick stack of notes and manuscript pages—a draft of the memoir she’s been working on for almost 10 years. She decided to write this memoir about caring for Ruth’s mother, who’d suffered from Alzheimer’s. Now, as Ruth looks at all these pages, she feels panicked about her own “lost time” and the amount of work the draft still needs.
The memoir represents Ruth’s unwieldy past, which is filled with memories of her mother’s illness and Ruth’s own sorrow as she witnessed it. Instead of moving on and living in the present, Ruth has tied herself to the past by working on the memoir for the past 10 years. Because she has invested all this time on the project, she does not want to abandon it—and as a result, she spends more of her present wallowing in the past. Ruth does not want to admit that she’s wasted so much time on a project she dislikes.
Themes
Ruth thinks that she shouldn’t be wasting her time on someone else’s story, and she quickly turns to the end of Nao’s diary to see if she wrote until the end. She is happy to see that Nao has filled all the pages. Ruth wonders what happened after Nao finished the diary, but she closes her eyes because she doesn’t want to cheat and read the end.
Even though Ruth is worried for Nao, her enjoyment of the writing trumps her curiosity, and she decides to savor the diary as it was meant to be read. This speaks to her respect for Nao as a fellow writer.
Themes
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(2) Ruth’s friend Muriel, a retired anthropologist who knows a lot about garbage, examines the barnacles on the freezer bag. She says that Ruth should show it to Callie, who would be able to guess how old the creatures are and how long the bag has been in the water. Ruth says that Oliver thinks the freezer bag came on a drift from the tsunami, but Muriel thinks it might be too early for that.
Ruth seems to have a wonderful support system of friends here who are eager to help her, but Ruth doesn’t seem to realize this. Rather than sharing Nao’s story with Muriel, Ruth becomes territorial and hides the diary away. This perhaps implies that Ruth finds it difficult to communicate and share intimate details about her own life with others.
Themes
As Muriel carefully inspects the lunch box and its contents, Ruth feels tense. She realizes that she’s unwilling to share Nao and her story with Muriel, as this would mean leaving Nao open to Muriel’s judgment. She tells Muriel that Nao’s diary isn’t interesting and instead hands her the Japanese letters, saying that they seem more important. Ruth holds the diary under the table, out of Muriel’s sight.
Ruth feels very protective of Nao, which indicates that Ruth has already grown attached to her. Again, even though Ruth and Nao don’t know each other and lead very different lives, it seems that they were somehow destined to connect—Ruth is exactly the kind of person that Nao hoped would read her diary. Ruth and Nao both feel somewhat alienated from the people around them, and Ruth feels like she’s found a kindred spirit in Nao (a fellow writer) that she hasn’t found in islanders like Muriel.
Themes
Since Ruth can’t read the Japanese letters, she took them to Ayako, the Japanese wife of an oyster farmer who lives on the island. Ayako managed to decipher the dates, saying that the letters were written in 1944 and 1945. However, Ayako couldn’t read the alphabets, since young people who’ve grown up with computer are no longer able to handwrite. She’d told Ruth to try to find someone who was alive during World War II to help her.
This passage speaks to the idea that change is constant. Hearkening back to Jiko’s comment that even words are “time beings,” Ayako’s inability to decipher old, handwritten Japanese characters (despite being fluent in Japanese) indicates that even language and writing are not immune from change.
Themes
(3) Usually, when Ruth has a good writing day, she reads what she’s written to Oliver, right before they go to sleep. However, she hasn’t had a day like that in a while. Tonight, she reads the first few pages of Nao’s diary to him, and she feels protective about Nao when she comes to the part about the perverts. Oliver remarks that the nun sounds cool, and he asks Ruth if she thinks Nao is still alive. Ruth says that she doesn’t know and admits that she feels worried about Nao.
Ruth is still a little anxious about sharing Nao and her ideas with another person, as evidenced by her refusal to show Nao’s diary to Muriel. This mirrors Ruth’s feelings about her own writing, which she keeps private and never feels is properly finished or worth sharing. However, Ruth loves Oliver, which makes it easier for her to trust him with Nao’s words.
Themes
(4) Ruth continues reading and gets to the part where Nao wonders if her diary will end up in the garbage. Oliver tells Ruth that he’s been recently thinking about the Great Garbage Patches, which are immense patches of floating trash on the oceans. He says that if the freezer bag hadn’t somehow escaped the ocean currents, it would be stuck in the middle of a Garbage Patch. Oliver finds it “amazing” that it escaped and made its way to their shore. He’s been fiddling with the old watch as he speaks, and he suddenly exclaims that he wound it up and that it’s working again.
The fact that the freezer bag made it past so many potential challenges on the ocean—including but not limited to ocean currents and Garbage Patches—is rather miraculous, as Oliver points out. It seems like Ruth was destined to receive and read Nao’s diary.
Themes
(5) Ruth lies awake in bed that night, listening to the watch ticking and thinking of how Nao’s writing flows without inhibition. Ruth hasn’t written with such certainty in years, so she is in awe of Nao. Ruth recalls Nao’s words that she is “reaching through time to touch” her reader, and Ruth feels like the diary is warm in her hand. However, she knows that there is nothing supernatural about this, because she has started experiencing hot flashes recently.
The watch is a symbol of passing time. Ruth is getting older, as evidenced her symptoms of menopause like hot flashes; now, the watch’s loud ticking reminds her that her time to write is slowly running out. Ruth is almost envious of Nao’s writing talent and her ability to connect with her reader across time.
Themes
Ruth decides that she should pace herself as she reads Nao’s diary—she wants to experience it like Nao wrote it. Ruth also thinks that if she doesn’t rush through the diary, she’ll have time to work on her own writing.
Nao’s diary seems to have inspired Ruth to work on her own writing. Ruth, too, values the connection between reader and writer—and as a writer herself, she wants to forge these connections of her own.
Themes
(6) That night, Ruth dreams of a Japanese nun inside a dilapidated temple, typing on a computer inside a dark room. The nun wears dark robes and has a shaved head, and she has thick glasses that are similar to Ruth’s. Ruth sees that the nun is typing “Sometimesup / Sometimesdown,” which Ruth assumes must be an answer to the question Nao texted Jiko—the question about where the elevator of enlightenment takes its riders. The nun goes on to type that “up” and “down” are the “same thing” but that they are “also different.”
This is the first of the vivid, supernatural dreams that Ruth has after she starts reading Nao’s diary. The temple she sees in her dream, and Jiko’s office, are both exactly like places that Nao will describe later in her diary. However, Ruth hasn’t read these descriptions yet, so it is odd that she sees these places in her dream. In these supernatural dreams, Ruth seems to be traveling to another place and time, showing that her life has become deeply intertwined with Nao’s.
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