A Tale for the Time Being

(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 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.”

(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.

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.

(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.”

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.

(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.

(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.

(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.