The Difficulty of Communication Theme 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 Granny, it’s going to take forever!”

“Well, we must try even harder, then.”

“We?!”

“Of course, dear Nao. You must help me.”

“No way!” I told Granny. “Forget it! I’m no fucking bosatsu…”

[…] I think maybe she was saying a blessing for me just then, too. I didn’t mind. It made me feel safe, like I knew no matter what happened, Granny was going to make sure I got onto that elevator.

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.

[…] Dad would walk me to school and we’d talk about stuff. I don’t remember exactly what, and it didn’t matter. The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.

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.

I already thought my father was insane, because this was at a time when I still believed that only insane people try to kill themselves, but at the back of my mind, I guess I was hoping that my mom was normal and okay again […]. But at that moment I knew she was as crazy and unreliable as my father, […] which meant there was nobody left in my life I could count on to keep me safe. I don't think I’ve ever felt as naked or alone. My knees went all soft as I sank, crouching there, cradling my fish. It thrashed one last time, rising up almost into my throat, and then it flopped back down and just lay there, gasping for air. I held it. It was dying in my arms.

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.

Over and over, I ran at the sea, beating it until I was so tired I could barely stand. And then the next time I fell down, I just lay there and let the waves wash over me, and I wondered what would happen if I stopped trying to get
back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones
would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye sockets.

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.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t grateful to her. I really was. She was my only friend, and if I couldn’t hang out at Fifi’s Lonely Apron, where could I go? My home
life was a disaster. Mom [...] was killing herself working overtime. Dad [...] was depressed like I’ve never seen him before, like he’d finally and truly lost all interest in being alive. He avoided any contact with me and Mom, which is a trick in a small two-room apartment. [...] [S]ometimes, if I happened to pass him in the narrow hallway and catch his eye, his face would twitch and start to crumple with the weight of his shame, and I had to turn my head away because I couldn’t bear to see it.

I have written to you of my decision to die. Here is what I did not tell you. […] [T]he ticking of the clock is the only sound I am able to hear now. Second by second, minute by minute…tick, tick, tick…the small, dry sounds fill every crevice of silence. […] [M]y being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time, marching toward my death.

If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! […] I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking open, my fingers digging into the guts, spilling springs and delicate gearing. But no, there is no […] way of stopping time, and so I lie here, paralyzed, listening to the last moments of my life tick by.

I don’t want to die, Maman! I don’t want to die!

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!”