A Tale for the Time Being (3 page)

Okay, my dear old Jiko. I’ll start right here at Fifi’s Lovely Apron. Fifi’s is one of a bunch of maid cafés that popped up all over Akiba Electricity Town
¹¹
a couple of years ago, but what makes Fifi’s a little bit special is the French salon theme. The interior is decorated mostly in pink and red, with accents
of gold and ebony and ivory. The tables are round and cozy, with marblelike tops and legs that look like carved mahogany, and the matching chairs have pink puff tapestry seats. Dark red velvet
roses curl up the wallpaper, and the windows are draped in satin. The ceiling is gilded and hung with crystal chandeliers, and little naked Kewpie dolls float like clouds in the corners.
There’s an entryway and coatroom with a trickling fountain and a statue of a nude lady lit by a throbbing red spot.

I don’t know if this decor is authentic or not as I’ve never visited France, but I’m going to guess that probably there aren’t many French maid cafés like this in
Paris. It doesn’t matter. The feeling at Fifi’s Lovely Apron is very chic and intimate, like being stuffed inside a great big claustrophobic valentine, and the maids, with their
pushed-up breasts and frilly uniforms, look like cute little valentines, too.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty empty in here right now, except for some otaku
¹²
types at the corner table, and two bug-eyed American tourists. The
maids are standing in a sulky line, picking at the lace on their petticoats and looking bored and disappointed with us, like they’re hoping for some new and better customers to come in and
liven things up. There was a little bit of excitement a while ago when one otaku ordered omurice
¹³
with a big red Hello Kitty face painted in ketchup
on top. A maid whose name tag says she’s Mimi knelt down before him to feed him, blowing on each bite before spooning it into his mouth. The Americans got a real kick out of that, which was
hilarious. I wish you could have seen it. But then he finished, and Mimi took his dirty plate away, and now it’s boring again. The Americans are just drinking coffees. The husband is trying
to get his wife to let him order a Hello Kitty omurice, too, but she’s way too uptight. I heard her whispering that the omurice is too expensive, and she’s got a point. The food here is
a total rip-off, but I get my coffee for free because Babette is my friend. I’ll let you know if the wife loosens up and changes her mind.

It didn’t used to be this way. Back when maid cafés were ninki #1!
¹⁴
Babette told me that the customers used to line up and wait for
hours just to get a table, and the maids were all the prettiest girls in Tokyo, and you could hear them over the noise of Electricity Town calling out, Okaerinasaimase, dannasama!,
¹⁵
which makes men feel rich and important. But now the fad is over and maids are no longer
it
, and the only customers are tourists from abroad, and
otaku
¹⁶
from the countryside, or sad hentai with out-of-date fetishes for maids. And the maids, too, are not so pretty or cute anymore, since you can
make a lot more money being a nurse at a medical café or a fuzzy plushy in Bedtown.
¹⁷
French maids are downward trending for sure, and everyone
knows this, so nobody’s bothering to try very hard. You could say it’s a depressing ambience, but personally, I find it relaxing exactly because nobody’s trying too hard.
What’s depressing is when everyone is trying too hard, and the most depressing thing of all is when they’re trying too hard and actually thinking that they’re making it. I’m
sure that’s what it used to be like around here, with all the cheerful jangle of bells and laughing, and lines of customers around the block, and cute little maids sucking up to the
café owners, who slouched around in their designer sunglasses and vintage Levi’s like dark princes or game-empire moguls. Those dudes had a long, long way to fall.

So I don’t mind this at all. I kind of like it because I know I can always get a table here at Fifi’s Lovely Apron, and the music is okay, and the maids know me now and usually leave
me alone. Maybe it should be called Fifi’s Lonely Apron. Hey, that’s good! I like that!

2.

My old Jiko really likes it when I tell her lots of details about modern life. She doesn’t get out very much anymore because she lives in a temple in the mountains in the
middle of nowhere and has renounced the world, and also there’s the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that’s her age, but actually I’m just guessing.
We don’t really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn’t remember, either. When you ask her, she says,

“Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne.”
¹⁸

Which is not an answer, so you ask her again, and she says,

“Soo desu ne.
¹⁹
I haven’t counted for so long . . .”

So then you ask her when her birthday is, and she says,

“Hmm, I don’t really remember being born . . .”

And if you pester her some more and ask her how long she’s been alive, she says,

“I’ve always been here as far as I remember.”

Well, duh, Granny!

All we know for sure is that there’s nobody older than her who remembers, and the family register at the ward office got burned up in a firebombing during World War II, so basically we
have to take her word for it. A couple of years ago, she kind of got fixated on a hundred and four, and that’s what it’s been ever since.

And as I was saying, my old Jiko really likes detail, and she likes it when I tell her about all the little sounds and smells and colors and lights and advertising and people and fashions and
newspaper headlines that make up the noisy ocean of Tokyo, which is why I’ve trained myself to notice and remember. I tell her everything, about cultural trends and news items I read about
high school girls who get raped and suffocated with plastic bags in love hotels. You can tell Granny all that kind of stuff and she doesn’t mind. I don’t mean it makes her happy.
She’s not a hentai. But she understands that shit happens, and she just sits there and listens and nods her head and counts the beads on her juzu,
²⁰
saying blessings for those poor high school girls and the perverts and all the beings who are suffering in the world. She’s a nun, so that’s her job. I swear,
sometimes I think the main reason she’s still alive is because of all the stuff I give her to pray about.

I asked her once why she liked to hear stories like this, and she explained to me that when she got ordained, she shaved her head and took some vows to be a bosatsu.
²¹
One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first.
It’s kind of like letting everybody else get into the elevator ahead of you. When you calculate all the beings on this earth at any time, and then add in the ones that are getting born every
second and the ones that have already died—and not just human beings, either, but all the animals and other life-forms like amoebas and viruses and maybe even plants that have ever lived or
ever will live, as well as all the extinct species—well, you can see that enlightenment will take a very long time. And what if the elevator gets full and the doors slam shut and you’re
still standing outside?

When I asked Granny about this, she rubbed her shiny bald head and said, “Soo desu ne. It is a very big elevator . . .”

“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 . . .”

But she just smacked her lips and clicked her juzu beads, and the way she looked at me through those thick black-framed glasses of hers, 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.

You know what? Just this second, as I was writing this, I realized something. I never asked her where that elevator is going. I’m going to text her now and ask. I’ll let you know
what she says.

3.

Okay, so now I really am going to tell you about the fascinating life of Yasutani Jiko, the famous anarchist-feminist-novelist-turned-Buddhist-nun of the Taisho era, but first I
need to explain about this book you’re holding.
²²
You’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t look like an ordinary schoolgirl’s
pure diary with puffy marshmallow animals on a shiny pink cover, and a heart-shaped lock, and a little golden key. And when you first picked it up, you probably didn’t think, Oh, here’s
a nice pure diary written by an interesting Japanese schoolgirl. Gee, I think I’ll read that! because when you picked it up, you thought it was a philosophical masterpiece called
À
la recherche du temps perdu
by the famous French author named Marcel Proust, and not an insignificant diary by a nobody named Nao Yasutani. So it just goes to show that it’s true what
they say: You can’t tell a book by its cover!
²³

I hope you’re not too disappointed. What happened is that Marcel Proust’s book got hacked, only I didn’t do it. I bought it this way, prehacked, at a little handicraft boutique
over in Harajuku
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where they sell one-of-a-kind DIY goods like crochet scarves and keitai pouches and beaded cuffs and other cool stuff. Handicraft is
a superbig fad in Japan, and everyone is knitting and beading and crocheting and making pepakura,
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but I’m quite clumsy so I have to buy my DIY
goods if I want to keep up with the trend. The girl who makes these diaries is a superfamous crafter, who buys containerloads of old books from all over the world, and then neatly cuts out all the
printed pages and puts in blank paper instead. She does it so authentically you don’t even notice the hack, and you almost think that the letters just slipped off the pages and fell to the
floor like a pile of dead ants.

Recently some nasty stuff has been happening in my life, and the day I bought the diary, I was skipping school and feeling especially blue, so I decided to go shopping in Harajuku to cheer
myself up. When I saw these old books on the shelf, I thought they were a shop display so I didn’t pay any attention to them, but when the salesgirl pointed out the hack to me, of course I
had to have one immediately. And they weren’t cheap, either, but I loved the worn feeling of the cover, and I could tell it would feel so good to write inside, like a real published book. But
best of all, I knew it would be an excellent security feature.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this problem of people beating you up and stealing things from you and using them against you, but if you have, then you’ll understand that this
book was total genius, in case one of my stupid classmates decided to casually pick up my diary and read it and post it to the Internet or something. But who would pick up an old book called
À la recherche du temps perdu
, right? My stupid classmates would just think it was homework for juku.
²⁶
They wouldn’t even know
what it meant.

Actually, I didn’t know what it meant either, since my ability to speak French is nonexistent. There were a bunch of books with different titles for sale. Some of them were in English,
like
Great Expectations
and
Gulliver’s Travels
, which were okay, but I thought it would be better to buy a title I couldn’t read, since knowing the meaning might
possibly interfere with my own creative expression. There were others in different languages, too, like German and Russian and even Chinese, but I ended up choosing
À la recherche du
temps perdu
because I figured it was probably French, and French is cool and has a sophisticated feeling, and besides, this book is exactly the right size to fit into my handbag.

4.

The minute I bought the book, of course, I wanted to start writing in it, so I went to a nearby kissa
²⁷
and ordered a Blue
Mountain, then I took out my favorite purple gel ink pen and opened the book to the first creamy page. I took a bitter sip and waited for the words to come. I waited and waited, and sipped some
more coffee, and waited some more. Nothing. I’m pretty chatty, as you can probably tell, and usually I don’t have any trouble coming up with stuff to say. But this time, even though I
had a lot on my mind, the words didn’t come. It was weird, but I figured I was just feeling intimidated by the new-old book and would eventually get over it. So I drank the rest of my coffee
and read a couple of manga, and when it was time for school to let out, I went home.

But the next day I tried again, and the same thing happened. And after that, every time I took out the book, I’d stare at the title and start to wonder. I mean, Marcel Proust must be
pretty important if even someone like me had heard of him, even if I didn’t know who he was at first and thought he was a celebrity chef or a French fashion designer. What if his ghost was
still clinging to the inside of the covers and was pissed off at the hack the crafty girl had done, cutting out his words and pages? And what if now the ghost was preventing me from using his
famous book to write about typical dumb schoolgirl stuff, like my crushes on boys (not that I have any), or new fashions I want (my desires are endless), or my fat thighs (actually my thighs are
fine, it’s my knees I hate). You really can’t blame old Marcel’s ghost for getting righteously pissed off, thinking I might be dumb enough to write this kind of stupid crap inside
his important book.

And even if his ghost didn’t mind, I still wouldn’t want to use his book for such trivial stuff, even if these weren’t my last days on earth. But since these
are
my
last days on earth, I want to write something important, too. Well, maybe not important, because I don’t know anything important, but something worthwhile. I want to leave something real
behind.