A Tale for the Time Being: Dramatic Irony 3 key examples

The concealment is just the latest struggle in a trans-Pacific move that is anything but smooth. Amid a transition plagued by moldy bathtubs, her father’s suicide, and financial insecurity, Nao tries easing the burden off her parents’ shoulders. Neither is she the only family member who tries their hand at inventing fictions of normalcy. Haruki #2 lies about his unemployment and cooks up fantasies in which he finds a new job designing empathetic technology. Meanwhile, Nao’s mother brushes aside his suicide attempt with the futile illusion that nothing is out of order—“we all pretended it never happened,” Nao recalls as the family labors under the weight of its own lies.

In this case, Nao’s efforts to downplay the ijime backfire. She ends up revealing her scars to her mother when they use the public bathhouses, and the bullying only intensifies after the incidents get referred to the school. For Nao’s father, the eventual discovery of the bullying is more devastating still: shaken by the sight of his daughter’s blood-stained underpants being auctioned online, Haruki #2 attempts to commit suicide a second time. Dramatic irony tests the limits of the family’s love, the fraught spaces where words fall short.

With painful frankness, Nao describes the queasy distance that grows between her and her American friends. This is an example of dramatic irony because the reader knows something that Kayla does not. Thousands of miles from her Sunnyvale home, Nao cannot admit to Kayla the truth of her daily scratches or her family’s struggles to adjust, resorting instead to an account with gaping omissions. She curates a narrative so slick that Kayla finds the distance between them almost “unreal.”

Nao’s narrative strains the friendship. It also destabilizes the novel itself: through her editorialized texts, Nao creates multiple identities and throws the truthfulness of self-presentation into doubt. There is the Nao who polishes her messages with trivia about Japanese culture, performing a self that is not truly hers. There is also the Nao who plainly admits her vulnerability before Ruth and the reader. Who, then, is she truly? Is this diary to Ruth—cheeky and chirpy—a performance itself, like her messages to Kayla? The novel’s dramatic irony calls into question the very nature of truth and storytelling.

Swiftly and decisively, Haruki #1 advances a story that undercuts the cheerful impression he had made in his earlier letters to Jiko. There, he had shrugged off Marquis de F—’s violent abuses at the training camp and disturbingly valorizes his act of sacrifice. Death by kamikaze is “pure, clean, and purposeful,” he writes in praise of his suicidal self-destruction. Here, though, he criticizes the country’s “imbecilic lynching” and chronicles the brutalities of Japan’s military regime with painful detail. The Marquis de F— rapes and beats him. “I have spoiled this page with my tears so I can barely make out the words,” Haruki #1 writes as he reflects on the indignities of war.

The catch is that these confessions are entirely unbeknownst to both Nao and Haruki #2—at one point, Nao even celebrates her granduncle’s wartime valor before her pacifist father. The dramatic irony gives Ruth and the reader this intimate knowledge, but not any of the other characters. As consequence, it tasks Ruth with the duty of clearing the past. Saving Nao and disabusing her of history’s myths requires the reader to intervene—Ruth is no longer a passive onlooker but a member of the story as she slip the French diary on the altar during Jiko’s funeral. Doing justice to Haruki #1’s story means correcting the record, even if it comes decades late. A Tale for the Time Being reframes the nature of storytelling into a mutual relationship that places responsibility upon the reader.