A Tale for the Time Being (4 page)

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. Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I’m just wasting my time, and I’m not the only one. Everybody I know is the
same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy.

And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?

And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.

5.

So anyway, these distracting thoughts about ghosts and time kept drifting through my mind every time I tried to write in old Marcel’s book, until finally I decided that I
had to know what the title meant. I asked Babette, but she couldn’t help me because of course she’s not a real French maid, just a high school dropout from Chiba prefecture, and the
only French she knows is a couple of sexy phrases she picked up from this farty old French professor she was dating for a while. So when I got home that night, I googled Marcel Proust and learned
that
À la recherche du temps perdu
means “In search of lost time.”

Weird, right? I mean, there I was, sitting in a French maid café in Akiba, thinking about lost time, and old Marcel Proust was sitting in France a hundred years ago, writing a whole book
about the exact same subject. So maybe his ghost was lingering between the covers and hacking into my mind, or maybe it was just a crazy coincidence, but either way, how cool is that? I think
coincidences are cool, even if they don’t mean anything, and who knows? Maybe they do! I’m not saying everything happens for a reason. It was more just that it felt as if me and old
Marcel were on the same wavelength.

The next day I went back to Fifi’s and ordered a small pot of lapsang souchong, which I drink sometimes as a break from Blue Mountain, and as I sat there, sipping the smoky tea and
nibbling a French pastry, waiting for Babette to set me up on a date, I started to wonder.

How do you search for lost time, anyway? It’s an interesting question, so I texted it to old Jiko, which is what I always do when I have a philosophical dilemma. And then I had to wait for
a really, really long time, but finally my keitai gave a little ping that tells me she’s texted me back. And what she wrote was this:

which means something like this:

I’m not very good at poetry, but when I read old Jiko’s poem, I saw an image in my mind of this big old ginkgo tree on the grounds of her temple.
²⁹
The leaves are shaped like little green fans, and in the autumn they turn bright yellow and fall off and cover the ground, painting everything pure golden. And it
occurred to me that the big old tree is a time being, and Jiko is a time being, too, and I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree, sifting through the fallen leaves that are
her scattered golden words.

The idea of the time being comes from a book called
Sh
ō
b
ō
genz
ō
that an ancient Zen
master named D
ō
gen Zenji wrote about eight hundred years ago, which makes him even older than old Jiko or even Marcel Proust. D
ō
gen
Zenji is one of Jiko’s favorite authors, and he’s lucky because his books are important and still kicking around. Unfortunately, everything Jiko wrote is out of print so I’ve
actually never read her words, but she’s told me lots of stories, and I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too, and that’s when the idea popped into my mind
of using Marcel Proust’s important book to write down my old Jiko’s life.

It’s not just because Jiko is the most important person I know, although that’s part of it. And it’s not just because she is incredibly old and was alive back when Marcel
Proust was writing his book about time. Maybe she was, but that’s not why, either. The reason I decided to write about her in
À la recherche du temps perdu
is because she is
the only person I know who really understands time.

Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she’s just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the
garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she’ll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so you know she is telling
you a joke. I mean, she understands perfectly well that time isn’t something you can spread out like butter or jam, and death isn’t going to hang around and wait for you to finish
whatever you happen to be doing before it zaps you. That’s the joke, and she laughs because she knows it.

But actually, I don’t think it’s very funny. Even though I don’t know old Jiko’s exact age, I do know for sure that pretty soon she’ll be dead even if she
hasn’t finished sweeping out the temple kitchen or weeding the daikon patch or arranging fresh flowers on the altar, and once she’s dead, that will be the end of her, timewise. This
doesn’t bother her at all, but it bothers me a lot. These are old Jiko’s last days on earth, and there’s nothing I can do about that, and there’s nothing I can do to stop
time from passing or even to slow it down, and every second of the day is another second lost. She probably wouldn’t agree with me, but that’s how I see it.

I don’t mind thinking of the world without me because I’m unexceptional, but I hate the idea of the world without old Jiko. She’s totally unique and special, like the last
Galapagos tortoise or some other ancient animal hobbling around on the scorched earth, who is the only one left of its kind. But please don’t get me going on the topic of species extinction
because it’s totally depressing, and I’ll have to commit suicide right this second.

6.

Okay, Nao. Why are you doing this? Like, what’s the point?

This is a problem. The only reason I can think of for writing Jiko’s life story in this book is because I love her and want to remember her, but I’m not planning on sticking around
for long, and I can’t remember her stories if I’m dead, right?

And apart from me, who else would care? I mean, if I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I’d post her stories on a blog, but actually I stopped doing that a while ago. It
made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.
³⁰
And
when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because
they’re all so busy writing and posting,
³¹
it kind of broke my heart.

The fact is, I don’t have much of a social network these days, and the people I hang out with aren’t the kind who care about a hundred-and-four-year-old Buddhist nun, even if she is
a bosatsu who can use email and texting, and that’s only because I made her buy a computer so she could stay in touch with me when I’m in Tokyo and she’s at her falling-down old
temple on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. She’s not crazy about new technology, but she does pretty well for a time being with cataracts and arthritis in both her thumbs. Old Jiko and
Marcel Proust come from a prewired world, which is a time that’s totally lost these days.

So here I am, at Fifi’s Lonely Apron, staring at all these blank pages and asking myself why I’m bothering, when suddenly an amazing idea knocks me over. Ready? Here it is:

I will write down everything I know about Jiko’s life in Marcel’s book, and when I’m done, I’ll just leave it somewhere, and you will find it!

How cool is that? It feels like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me!

If you ask me, it’s fantastically cool and beautiful. It’s like a message in a bottle, cast out onto the ocean of time and space. Totally personal, and real, too, right out of old
Jiko’s and Marcel’s prewired world. It’s the opposite of a blog. It’s an antiblog, because it’s meant for only one special person, and that person is
you
. And
if you’ve read this far, you probably understand what I mean. Do you understand? Do you feel special yet?

I’ll just wait here for a while to see if you answer . . .

7.

Just kidding. I know you can’t answer, and now I feel stupid, because what if you don’t feel special? I’m making an assumption, right? What if you just think
I’m a jerk and toss me into the garbage, like all those young girls I tell old Jiko about, who get killed by perverts and chopped up and thrown into dumpsters, just because they’ve made
the mistake of dating the wrong guy? That would be really sad and scary.

Or, here’s another scary thought, what if you’re not reading this at all? What if you never even found this book, because somebody chucked it in the trash or recycled it before it
got to you? Then old Jiko’s stories truly will be lost forever, and I’m just sitting here wasting time talking to the inside of a dumpster.

Hey, answer me! Am I stuck inside of a garbage can, or not?

Just kidding. Again.

Okay, here’s what I’ve decided. I don’t mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting. And I don’t think old Jiko will mind, either, because
being a Buddhist, she really understands impermanence and that everything changes and nothing lasts forever. Old Jiko really isn’t going to care if her life stories get written or lost, and
maybe I’ve picked up a little of that laissez-faire attitude from her. When the time comes, I can just let it all go.

Or not. I don’t know. Maybe by the time I’ve written the last page, I’ll be too embarrassed or ashamed to leave it lying around, and I’ll wimp out and destroy it
instead.