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Hyperbole
Definition of Irony
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how... read full definition
Part I, Chapter 7: Nao
Explanation and Analysis—Ijime:
Dramatic irony drives a wedge between Nao and her parents in Part I, complicating an already rocky adjustment to life in Japan. As the bullying episodes worsen at school, Nao attempts to hide her scars from her parents, leaving readers with information that Nao's family lacks:
The new school year had started in March, and I had somehow managed to get into the ninth grade, but the ijime was only getting worse. Until then I’d managed to hide all the little scars and pinch-shaped bruises on my arms and legs, but then one night our bathtub broke.
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.
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Explanation and Analysis—Kayla:
Upon her move to Japan, sustaining old friendships is the least of Nao’s worries. And yet it claims her attention nonetheless; Nao describes the often-exhausting ritual of keeping in contact with her old friend, Kayla. She fills their texts with morsels of fun facts and plenty of dramatic irony:
Once I got home, my dad usually made me a snack, and I sat with him and did my homework or just surfed around on the Internet, killing time or texting with my best friend in Sunnyvale, Kayla, who still liked me enough to hang out with me online. But even that was kind of stressful, to tell you the truth, because she kept wanting to know what my school was like, and I wasn’t going to tell her about the ijime, because then she’d know what a total loser I’d become, so instead I just tried to explain all the funny odd things about Japan to her.
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.
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Part III, Chapter 7: Haruki #1’s Secret French Diary
Explanation and Analysis—Haruki #1’s Valor:
Dramatic irony takes Ruth and the reader by surprise in Part III. Washed up with Nao’s diary is a battered copy of Haruki #1’s journal written in French. With the help of Benoit’s translation, Ruth opens the cover of this second diary to stumble across an entirely alternate side of the truth. In these more intimate writings, Nao’s granduncle explains the motives for keeping this second journal:
Duplicity is a hardship I am unwilling to suffer, so I have decided I will keep two records: one for show, and this hidden one for truth, for you, even though I hardly expect you will ever read this. I will write in French, ma chère Maman, following the good example of your idol, Kanno-san, who faithfully persisted in her English lessons right up until the moment they led her to the gallows. Like her, we must keep up our studies even as civilization collapses around us.
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.
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Explanation and Analysis—Marquis de F—’s Abuse:
The irony of Marquis de F—’s punishing abuses is that they eventually lose their frightening edge. In Part III, Haruki #1 describes his change of feeling towards the sadistic squadron leader over the course of weeks and months:
And in fact, my feelings toward the Marquis have begun to transform. At first, when he beat me, I was afraid…Eventually the beating must have come to an end. Someone must have carried me back to the barracks and covered me with a blanket. When I woke, my body must have hurt, but I couldn’t feel the pain. Instead, I was enveloped in a warm sensation of peace, which comes from the knowledge of inner power.
Time at the military camp pulls off a strange situational irony upon Marquis de F—’s brutal tactics. Haruki is terrified of the punishments during his first months of training. But that changes as he cycles through fear, pity, and rage. As training progresses, the measures that had been intended to hurt Haruki end up helping him. Marquis de F—’s abuse strengthens Haruki #1, who uncovers his “inner power” and realizes the leader’s own pathetic weaknesses. Haruki #1 notices the “fever in his narrow-set eyes and the greasy sweat upon his brow,” picks up on a whiff of fear from the leader and “[outgrows] this childishness.” Far from deterring his trainee, Marquis de F—’s discipline merely betrays his own anxieties and gives Haruki #1 a redoubled inner resolve.
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Part III, Chapter 9: Nao
Explanation and Analysis—Preparing to Die:
Suicide brings situational irony to Nao, who resolves to kill herself as she nears the end of her diary. In Part III, she explains to the reader the unexpected psychological effects of her decision:
Making the decision to end my life really helped me lighten up, and suddenly all the stuff my old Jiko had told me about the time being really kicked into focus. There’s nothing like realizing that you don’t have much time left to stimulate your appreciation for the moments of your life. I mean it sounds corny, but I started to really experience stuff for the first time, like the beauty of the plum and cherry blossoms along the avenues in Ueno Park, when the trees are in bloom.
Committed to death, Nao ironically ends up experiencing life more fully than she had before. It is an effect that pulls the wisdom of “living only once” into clarity. For the first time, she pauses to savor the “plum and cherry blossoms” and their raining petals. Faced with the prospect of her own impermanence, Nao learns how to appreciate her life. Every moment comes with finality, a sense of fleetingness that imparts new meaning to her surroundings. Mortality, in her case, shapes vitality. “I had a project and a goal to focus on. I had to figure out everything I wanted to accomplish in my remaining time on earth,” Nao explains. Through death, ironically, she finds an unexpected source of life.
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Explanation and Analysis—Hideous Babette:
Nao’s relationship with Babette takes a turn towards the troubling—and the ironic—during a tense exchange in Part III. Trapped into performing sex services on Babette’s behalf, Nao refuses when the pimp pairs her with a greasy otaku customer. She pays dearly for it, as Babette shows her true colors:
She took my cheeks in both hands and pinched so hard that my eyes filled with tears. She pulled me toward her until my forehead was almost touching hers, and her two eyes became one, a single hideous eye, dark and glittering, surrounded by ruffles and lace.
“You’re lucky I’m generous and sharing with you at all,” she said. “The trouble with you is that you’re too American. You’re lazy and selfish. You should learn to be loyal and work hard.”
The tense exchange lays bare the irony of their friendship. Earlier, Babette’s kindness had saved Nao from her crumbling life at school and home. “She knew just how to take care of me and make me feel better,” Nao writes in gratitude when the bar hostess takes her through Tokyo’s inner districts and distracts her with shopping quests. Babette offers Nao a reprieve from a world that seemed to have been falling apart. Here, though, her hidden intentions rear their ugly heads. The pimp flashes her greed more than any semblance of goodwill as she forces Nao to serve the customers. What saved Nao now hurts her, sexual exploitation shedding its costume of friendly sympathy. Nao notes how Babette’s “two eyes became one, a single hideous eye”—a description that does nothing so much as call back to Reiko’s cruelty and dark pupils that had occupied her earlier dream. She gets spared the horrific abuses of school life, only to find herself in the clutches of another bullying, oppressive system.
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