Ruth Character Analysis

Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present,
writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you’re reading this, then maybe by now you’re wondering about me, too.

But since these are my last days on earth, I want to write something important. […] I want to leave something real behind.

But what can I write about that’s real? Sure, I can write about all the bad shit that’s happened to me, and my feelings about my dad and my mom and my so-called friends, but I don’t particularly want to.

What if you never even found this book, because somebody chucked it in the trash or recycled it before it got to you? Then old Jiko’s stories truly will be lost forever, and I’m just sitting here wasting time talking to the inside of a dumpster. […]

Okay, here’s what I’ve decided. I don’t mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting. And I don’t think old Jiko will mind, either, because being
a Buddhist, she really understands impermanence and that everything changes and nothing lasts forever.

But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the thinnest veneer. Engulfed by the thorny roses and massing
bamboo, she stared out the window and felt like she’d stepped into a malevolent fairy tale. She’d been bewitched. She’d pricked her finger and
had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep. The years had passed, and she was not
getting any younger. […] Now that her mother was dead, Ruth felt that her own life was passing her by. Maybe it was time to leave this place she’d hoped would be home forever. Maybe it was time to break the spell.

Every few hours, another horrifying piece of footage would break, and she would play it over and over, studying the wave as it surged over the tops of the seawalls, carrying ships down city streets, picking up cars and trucks and depositing them on the roofs of buildings. She watched whole towns get crushed and swept away in a matter of moments, and she was aware that while these moments were captured online, so many other moments simply vanished. […]

But always, from the vantage point of the camera, you could see how fast the wave was traveling and how immense it was.

It’s the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.

Jiko felt like that when she learned that her only son was going to be killed in the war. […] In fact, she said she had lots of fishes, […] but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki #1, and it was more like the size of a whale. She also said that after she became a nun and renounced the world, she learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away. I'm trying to learn how to do that, too.

The Earthquake Catfish is not solely a malevolent fish, despite the havoc and calamity it can wreak. It has benevolent aspects as well. A subspecies of the
Earthquake catfish is […] World-Rectifying Catfish,
which is able to heal the political and economic corruption in society by shaking things up. […]

The World-Rectifying Catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent […].
The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go of their assets, which would create jobs […] for the working classes.

Today during a test flight, I remembered Miyazawa Kenji's wonderful tale about the Crow Wars. […] [As] I was soaring in formation at an altitude of two thousand meters, I recalled the Crow Captain lifting off from his honey locust tree, and taking to wing to do battle. I am Crow! I thought, ecstatically. The visibility was good, and since this was the very last of the special training
flights, I flew in all directions to my heart’s content.

But the fact is, you’re a lie. You’re just another stupid story I made up out of
thin air because I was lonely and needed someone to spill my guts to. I wasn’t
ready to die yet and needed a raison d’etre. I shouldn’t be mad at you but I am! Because now you’re letting me down, too.

The fact is, I’m all alone.

[…] Everyone I believed in is dying. My old Jiko is dying, my dad is probably already dead by now, and I don’t even believe in myself anymore.

“[M]y theory is that this crow from Nao’s world came here to lead you into the dream so you could change the end of her story. Her story was about to end one way, and you intervened, which set up the conditions for a different outcome. […] .”

[…]

“I see. So what’s your second theory?”

“[…] That it’s your doing. It’s not about Nao’s now. It’s about yours. You haven’t caught up with yourself yet, the now of your story, and you can’t reach her ending until you do.”

Ruth thought about this. “You're right,” she said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like having that much agency over someone else’s narrative.”

Muriel laughed. “That’s a fine way for a novelist to talk!”

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

[…]

Had Dogen figured all this out? He’d written these words many centuries before quantum mechanics [.]

Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present,
writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you’re reading this, then maybe by now you’re wondering about me, too.

But since these are my last days on earth, I want to write something important. […] I want to leave something real behind.

But what can I write about that’s real? Sure, I can write about all the bad shit that’s happened to me, and my feelings about my dad and my mom and my so-called friends, but I don’t particularly want to.

What if you never even found this book, because somebody chucked it in the trash or recycled it before it got to you? Then old Jiko’s stories truly will be lost forever, and I’m just sitting here wasting time talking to the inside of a dumpster. […]

Okay, here’s what I’ve decided. I don’t mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting. And I don’t think old Jiko will mind, either, because being
a Buddhist, she really understands impermanence and that everything changes and nothing lasts forever.

But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the thinnest veneer. Engulfed by the thorny roses and massing
bamboo, she stared out the window and felt like she’d stepped into a malevolent fairy tale. She’d been bewitched. She’d pricked her finger and
had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep. The years had passed, and she was not
getting any younger. […] Now that her mother was dead, Ruth felt that her own life was passing her by. Maybe it was time to leave this place she’d hoped would be home forever. Maybe it was time to break the spell.

Every few hours, another horrifying piece of footage would break, and she would play it over and over, studying the wave as it surged over the tops of the seawalls, carrying ships down city streets, picking up cars and trucks and depositing them on the roofs of buildings. She watched whole towns get crushed and swept away in a matter of moments, and she was aware that while these moments were captured online, so many other moments simply vanished. […]

But always, from the vantage point of the camera, you could see how fast the wave was traveling and how immense it was.

It’s the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.

Jiko felt like that when she learned that her only son was going to be killed in the war. […] In fact, she said she had lots of fishes, […] but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki #1, and it was more like the size of a whale. She also said that after she became a nun and renounced the world, she learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away. I'm trying to learn how to do that, too.

The Earthquake Catfish is not solely a malevolent fish, despite the havoc and calamity it can wreak. It has benevolent aspects as well. A subspecies of the
Earthquake catfish is […] World-Rectifying Catfish,
which is able to heal the political and economic corruption in society by shaking things up. […]

The World-Rectifying Catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent […].
The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go of their assets, which would create jobs […] for the working classes.

Today during a test flight, I remembered Miyazawa Kenji's wonderful tale about the Crow Wars. […] [As] I was soaring in formation at an altitude of two thousand meters, I recalled the Crow Captain lifting off from his honey locust tree, and taking to wing to do battle. I am Crow! I thought, ecstatically. The visibility was good, and since this was the very last of the special training
flights, I flew in all directions to my heart’s content.

But the fact is, you’re a lie. You’re just another stupid story I made up out of
thin air because I was lonely and needed someone to spill my guts to. I wasn’t
ready to die yet and needed a raison d’etre. I shouldn’t be mad at you but I am! Because now you’re letting me down, too.

The fact is, I’m all alone.

[…] Everyone I believed in is dying. My old Jiko is dying, my dad is probably already dead by now, and I don’t even believe in myself anymore.

“[M]y theory is that this crow from Nao’s world came here to lead you into the dream so you could change the end of her story. Her story was about to end one way, and you intervened, which set up the conditions for a different outcome. […] .”

[…]

“I see. So what’s your second theory?”

“[…] That it’s your doing. It’s not about Nao’s now. It’s about yours. You haven’t caught up with yourself yet, the now of your story, and you can’t reach her ending until you do.”

Ruth thought about this. “You're right,” she said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like having that much agency over someone else’s narrative.”

Muriel laughed. “That’s a fine way for a novelist to talk!”

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

[…]

Had Dogen figured all this out? He’d written these words many centuries before quantum mechanics [.]