64 pages • 2 hours read
Ruth OzekiA Tale For The Time Being
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Nao”
Nao laments that whenever you write in a diary or about the past, you can never fully catch up with the present: “No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction” (98). As a little kid in California, she became obsessed with the English word “now” because it sounded like her name: “Nao was now and had this whole other meaning” (98).
At school, the other students continue to pretend that Nao is invisible and say things like “Transfer Student Yasutani hasn’t been to school weeks!” when they see her (99). One day, Nao senses that things are different at school and sees kids passing out cards. After school, she offers to go to the store to buy her dad cigarettes so that she can find one of her classmates named Daisuke, who also gets picked on at school. She beats him up and demands that he show her one of the cards. He hands it to her, and she discovers that it is an invitation to a funeral for “former transfer student Yasutani Naoko” (104). She holds her knife to his throat, but eventually decides to let him go.
Nao witnesses her own funeral because one of her classmates films the fake ceremony and emails her the link to the video. She feels that her funeral “was very beautiful and very real” (106). The classmates who bully her pretend to pay their respects to her by placing paper flowers in front of her picture, and Ugawa Sensei, the substitute teacher, chants a Buddhist hymn. As disturbing as it is, Nao is moved by the way in which everyone is pretending to honor her memory. She becomes obsessed with checking how many viewers the video of her funeral has.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Ruth”
Ruth is watching news coverage about the victims of the tsunami in Northern Japan. Afterwards, she searches for the video entitled “The Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Nao Yasutani” mentioned in the diary but cannot find the clip anywhere. She decides to call their friend Callie, a marine biologist, to ask her to look at the barnacles encrusted on the plastic bag that the lunchbox was wrapped in. Callie says that the barnacles are at least three years old, and Ruth is disappointed to learn that the bag probably did not drift over after the tsunami. While Callie is visiting with Ruth and Oliver, she spies the Jungle Crow and asks Ruth about it. Ruth realizes that Muriel has been telling everyone on the island about their conversations about the lunchbox and the crow. That night, Ruth reads the part of Nao’s diary about her funeral aloud to Oliver. After they fall asleep, Ruth dreams about the same Buddhist nun in the temple.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Nao”
Nao explains how when she first moved back to Japan she tried to keep a blog, which she called “The Future is Nao!” (125). She tries to stay positive in the blog, even though she is miserable, but she eventually gives it up after she realizes no one is reading it anyway. Kayla, her best friend from Sunnydale, also stops responding to her emails; Nao suspects it is because her popular best friend can sense that she has become a “pathetic loser” (125) in Japan.
After the funeral and Kayla’s failure to respond to her messages, Nao starts to feel like a ghost. About a week after the funeral, she has a dream about one of her classmates, Reiko, a popular girl who encourages the other kids at school to bully Nao. Nao dreams about stabbing Reiko in the eye and becomes convinced that she succeeded in hurting Reiko through her dream. Although it is summer break, Nao knows that her classmate Daisuke is in summer cram school with Reiko. The next day, she corners him and asks him if anything has happened to Reiko recently. He says that on Monday Reiko came to school with an eyepatch. According to Daisuke, Reiko told everyone that the patch was cosplay and that she was playing the role of Jubei-Chan, the Samurai Girl in The Secret of the Lovely Eyepatch. Nao, however, is sure that Reiko really had some kind of eye injury. She believes that she “actually escaped from [her] body to wreak revenge upon [her] enemy” (132).
The next week, Jiko comes to Nao’s family’s apartment. After hearing the doorbell ring several times, Nao opens the door to find two bald women in robes, one of whom is very elderly. The younger one asks if her father is at home, and Nao calls out in English to her dad that “two bald midgets in pajamas” (140) want to see him. The older woman pushes past Nao to go to her father on the balcony. When he sees the woman, he bursts into tears. Her dad reveals that the woman is his grandmother who has not seen Nao since she was a baby. When Nao’s mother gets home with sushi for five people, Nao realizes that she has organized this visit from Jiko and her assistant, a nun named Muji, in the hope of cheering up her father. During Jiko and Muji’s stay, Nao learns that her great-grandmother has invited her to spend the summer vacation with her at her temple. Her father urges her to go, telling her that he will be spending the summer visiting special doctors “who can teach [him] how to cope with [his] problems” (140).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Ruth”
Ruth heads out in a rainstorm for the Whaletown Post Office where she asks the local postmistress, Dora, why she has not heard back from Benoit LeBec, the francophone man on the island whom Ruth hopes can help translate the notebook written in French. Dora’s love of gossip and habit of reading other people’s mail means that she always has the latest news about people in the community. Dora tells Ruth that Benoit and his wife have been in Montreal for their niece’s wedding. She also reveals that she knows all about the French notebook found on the beach. Other people in the post office start to ask Ruth questions about the contents of the lunchbox. Ruth is irritated to find out that Muriel has been talking about her discovery with so many people on the island.
Ruth gets home to find Oliver trying to start the power generator. There has been a power outage, and the Internet is going in and out. Ruth sits down at her computer to do more research on the Yasutani family. After doing a search for “Yasutani Jiko,” “Zen,” “nun,” “novelist,” “Taisho,” and “Miyagi” (the prefecture where Nao’s great-grandmother’s temple is located), Ruth comes across an academic article entitled “The Instability of the Female ‘I’” (148). The author explains that the essay centers on the life and work of the writer Yasutani Jiko, “who worked with various feminist groups” and wrote “a single unusual and groundbreaking I-novel” before becoming a Zen Buddhist nun (150). Ruth is thrilled to have found proof that Nao’s family exists, but as soon as she clicks “Read more,” the Internet goes out.
The next day, Ruth and Oliver go down to the beach and find dozens of people searching the beach for items that may have washed up from the tsunami in Japan. They spot Muriel, who complains about the “scavengers” searching her part of the beach for “stuff from Japan” (152).
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
Nao’s classmates begin to shun her, especially after they hold a fake funeral for her and post it to the Internet, and Nao begins to feel as if she no longer exists and that time is continuing without her. Throughout A Tale for the Time Being, Ozeki examines the effect that the Internet has on the connections between people in contemporary society. In some ways, the Internet can be a good thing: it allows Ruth to find information about Nao’s family and to reach out to the professor who may have known Nao’s father. More often in this novel, however, it becomes an insufficient substitute for real human connection. Nao finds comfort in watching the fake funeral ceremony that her classmates host in her “honor” because it is the only kind of attention she gets from them. The anonymous views on the video feel like the only kind of recognition she can get. Nao talks about the loneliness of cyberspace when she reveals that she used to have a blog when she first moved to Tokyo but abandoned the effort after she realized that no one is reading it. Her best friend from home also stops responding to her emails. The Internet only increases Nao’s loneliness because it cannot offer her the real connections with other people that she longs for.
The character of Jiko finally appears directly in Nao’s story of her life in this section when she and Muji arrive at Nao’s family’s apartment in Tokyo. Jiko will become a significant part of Nao’s story since Nao frequently mentions Jiko in her diary and wants her writing to be a story of her remarkable great-grandmother’s life. Furthermore, Jiko has even appeared in the chapters about Ruth as she is clearly the Buddhist nun at the temple in Ruth’s dreams. The fact that both Ruth and Nao have significant dreams in this section— Ruth’s dreams about the nun and Nao’s dream about stabbing Reiko in the eye—also suggest that dreams will be a recurring motif in the novel. Nao is particularly unsettled by her dream as she believes that she directly caused the injury that led Reiko to wear an eyepatch to school. These dreams foreshadow the surreal twists that the novel will take as the story develops.
The concept of time also continues to be an important theme in this section of the novel. For instance, Nao describes her fascination with the English word “now” as a child because it sounded like her own name. She is fascinated by the concept of “now” because it seems paradoxical; the moment you describe something as happening “now,” that event becomes part of the past. Nao applies the problem of “now” to the act of writing, particularly writing in a diary about one’s life. As hard as she tries to capture the present moment, as soon as she writes anything down it becomes part of the past. In this sense, writing is always a “search for lost time”—an attempt to bring the past back into the present.
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