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Part I, Chapter 8: Ruth
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Tale for the Time Being, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time, Impermanence, and the Present
The Difficulty of Communication
Life vs. Death
Coincidences and Connections
Sexual Perversion and Violence
Summary
Analysis
(1) Nao says that the past is hard to write about. For instance, when she tries to write about her life in Sunnyvale, her past “happy life seems realer” than her present life—but she also feels disconnected from it. Perhaps, Nao says, her past self only ever existed in her imagination. She also points out that it’s impossible to write about the “now,” since one’s pen can never keep up with the present moment.
Nao realizes that although the past seems “realer” to her than her present (because it was happier), there’s no way of verifying that it’s any “realer” than the present. Nao recognizes that her conception of her past self only exists in the present—and in this way, the past is what’s unreal. This reflection connects to Ruth’s in the previous chapter, when she realized that her past life in New York City felt more real than her present life in Canada.
Themes
Nao says that when she was a little girl, she became obsessed with the word “now” because it sounded just like her name. The Japanese believe that “some words have kotodama, which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power.” To Nao, the kotodama of “now” was like a “slippery fish” that she couldn’t catch. Every time she said the word “now,” that moment in time was already over—it had changed to “then.”
Nao uses the simile of a slippery fish to express how the present moment is difficult to grasp, since it immediately turns into the past. In order to use the present, people need deep awareness of passing time. Since Nao’s name is a homophone of “now,” this signifies how she, too, is a product of time. For Ruth, meanwhile, Nao seems as hard to grasp as the present moment—the events of Nao’s life and her whereabouts are mysterious.
Themes
(2) Nao writes that Haruki was “doing really well for a suicidal person”—he even won third place in an origami contest called the Great Bug Wars. He’d made a giant staghorn beetle or Cyclommatus imperator.
Haruki is so interested in origami that he even enters a competition and wins a prize in it, which shows that he is still interested in some aspects of life. His creation, the giant staghorn beetle, is important, since this insect will remind Nao of her father later in the novel.
Themes
At school, all the ninth graders pretended that Nao was invisible. In Nao’s presence, her classmates wondered aloud whether she was sick, since she never came to school. When they changed out of their uniforms for gym class, the other girls held their noses when Nao took off her clothes, and they said that it smelled like something had died. Nao says that this is how they probably got the idea for her funeral.
Nao’s bullies completely ignored her, even when she spoke. This lack of communication leads to a complete erasure of Nao’s identity and value as a person, and it seems to be a fate similar to death. This connects to her classmates’ comments that Nao smells dead, as well as their idea of holding a funeral for her.
Themes
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(3) The week before summer vacation, Nao saw her classmates passing some cards around to one another. After school, Nao went home and grabbed a kitchen knife and then offered to buy her father some cigarettes so she could go out again. She lay in wait by some vending machines in her neighborhood for one of her classmates, Daisuke—a spindly, pathetic boy. When Nao saw him approach, she jumped out, grabbed him, and ordered him to give her the card. The card, written in calligraphy, was an announcement for a funeral service the next day. The deceased was “former transfer student Yasutani Naoko.”
By stopping all communication with Nao, her classmates were slowly erasing her existence, and they planned to finalize this erasure with a funeral service. This shows that communication and the exchange of ideas and feelings is an essential part of being alive—without the ability to communicate with others, a person isn’t fully living.
Themes
Like Nao, Daisuke was bullied at school because he was poor. However, Nao thought that he must be happy that she was being bullied instead of him. To punish him for this, she pulled his hair and held the knife against his throat. Then, time seemed to slow, and the future seemed full of limitless possibilities. Nao ended up releasing Daisuke; she told him she was sorry, and then they both went home.
This passage illustrates Dogen’s idea that a single moment of time contains the opportunity for making several decisions to change one’s life around. When Nao is on the brink of a huge decision that could change her life forever, time seems to slow down, and she comprehends the importance of a single moment in determining one’s future.
Themes
(4) At Nao’s funeral, her classmates set up a framed photo of Nao at her desk, and they took turns coming up to it and bowing. Ugawa Sensei chanted a Buddhist hymn called the Wisdom Heart Sutra, which is about how nothing in the world is permanent and how all things and beings “are just kind of flowing through for the time being.” Nao felt comforted by this idea.
Though the experience of seeing her own funeral must have been strange and hurtful for Nao, she does appreciate the idea of impermanence in the sutra that Ugawa Sensei chanted. The image of everything “flowing through for the time being” once again hearkens to the books title, suggesting that things are only real “for the time being”—that is, in the present moment. Since Nao’s own present situation was so painful for her, the idea of its impermanence must have been a consolation to her.
Themes
(5) Nao writes that she wasn’t actually present at her funeral—she pretended she was sick that day, so Nao’s mother let her stay home from school. She was happy to have missed the whole thing, but that evening, she got an anonymous email with a link to a video of the funeral. As Nao watched it, she saw that the video was getting thousands of views. She felt weirdly proud that she was so popular.
While Nao was shunned and bullied at school, she gained popularity after her staged funeral. This highlights the odd and impermanent nature of fame—it’s something random, ever-changing, and fleeting.
Themes
(6) Nao thinks of the Wisdom Heart Sutra, which Jiko explained to her. The last lines of the sutra mean, “gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray…” Nao thinks of how relieved Jiko will feel when all beings, even Nao’s cruel classmates, reach enlightenment and finally leave Jiko to rest.
The sutra celebrates the transformation that people experience after enlightenment. This shows that change isn’t always painful—it can also be joyful, since people can move from lives filled with pain and suffering to the freedom of spiritual enlightenment.
Themes
