A Tale For The Time Being

Ruth has just finished reading Benoit’s translation of Haruki #1’s French notebook. She thinks about how Nao doesn’t know that her great-uncle chose to fly into the ocean instead of the enemy’s battleship. Since Nao has never mentioned a secret French diary, Ruth assumes that Nao must not know about it and wonders how it ended up in the freezer bag along with the diary and the official Japanese letters. She wants to discuss these questions with Oliver, but he is very worried about their cat and is out searching in the rain. When she goes outside to get some wood for the stove, she sees the Jungle Crow and asks the bird what she should do.

After Nao refuses to go on any more dates, Babette becomes angry with her and threatens to kick her out of the café. Finally, Babette convinces Nao to go on a date with the seedy-looking businessman that Nao mentioned in the first chapter of her diary. Nao goes with the man to a cheap hotel, where he treats her very roughly. While he is having sex with her, Nao hears her phone ring and wonders if it is Jiko. The sound of the phone call and the pain she is currently experiencing shock her into action; she gets out from under him, slaps him in the face, and ties his arms together with his belt. The man is turned on by her violence and falls asleep after sex. After he falls asleep, Nao sees that the call was from Jiko and feels as if her great-grandmother has saved her. However, she then sees a text message from Muji telling her that Jiko is dying and Nao should come quickly. She goes home to tell her dad that Jiko is dying but when she gets there, she discovers that he is all dressed up. She realizes that he is going out with his friends from the suicide club to kill himself. She decides not to tell him about Jiko and goes alone to the temple.

Nao explains that night was only last night for her. After he leaves, she takes the train to the closest town to Jiko’s temple. The buses have stopped running by the time she arrives, so she has been waiting all night for the bus to Jiko’s village. As she sits on the bench waiting for the bus, Nao feels defeated by life because Jiko is dying, her dad has probably died already, and she does not believe in herself anymore. She even feels let down by the reader of the diary, who is after all “just another stupid story that I made up out of thin air because I was lonely and needed someone to spill my guts to” (340). She feels as if she is completely invisible.

Ruth gets to the last lines of Nao’s diary and discovers that the rest of the pages are blank. She is shocked as she remembers the writing continuing until the end of the book. She tells Oliver that the rest of the words have disappeared. He tells that that is impossible, but she is sure that she checked how far the writing continued several times. That night, Ruth dreams that she is traveling through time and space to Nao’s world in Japan, guided by the Jungle Crow. The crow takes her to a park where Nao’s dad is waiting for the members of his suicide club. She tells him that she has message for him from his daughter: “Please don’t do it” (352). When he says that he wants to get it over with so that his daughter can move on with her life, Ruth asks him not to be so selfish and tells him that Nao is planning to kill herself as well. She says that he is the only one who can stop her and explains that right now she is trying to get to the temple where his grandmother is dying. The next moment, Ruth moves through space to Jiko’s temple, where she realizes she is holding Haruki #1’s French notebook. She puts the notebook in the box where Haruki’s remains were supposed to go.