A Tale for the Time Being (5 page)

Hey, if you’re not reading this, you’ll know I’m a wimp! Ha-ha.

And as for that business about old Marcel’s ghost being pissed off, I’ve decided not to worry about it. When I was googling Marcel Proust, I happened to look up his sales ranking on
Amazon, and I couldn’t believe it but his books are all still in print, and depending on which edition of
À la recherche du temps perdu
you’re talking about, his ranking
is somewhere between 13,695 and 79,324, which is no best seller, but it’s not so bad for a dead guy. Just so you know. You don’t have to feel too sorry for old Marcel.

I don’t know how long this whole project is going to take me. Probably months. There are lots of blank pages, and Jiko’s got lots of stories, and I write pretty slow, but I’m
going to work really hard, and probably by the time I’m done filling in the last page, old Jiko will be dead, and it will be my time, too.

And I know I can’t possibly write down every detail about Jiko’s life, so if you want to learn more, you’ll have to read her books, if you can find them. Like I said before,
her stuff is all out of print, and it’s possible that some crafty girl has already hacked her pages and tossed all her golden words into the recycling bin next to Proust’s. That would
be really sad, because it’s not like old Jiko has any ranking on Amazon at all. I know because I checked and she isn’t even there. Hmm. I’m going to have to rethink this hacking
concept. Maybe it’s not so cool after all.

1.

The cat had climbed up onto Ruth’s desk and was preparing to make a strategic incursion onto her lap. She’d been reading the diary when he approached from the side,
placing his forepaws on her knees and nudging his nose underneath the spine of the book, pushing it up and out of his way. Once that was done, he settled himself on her lap and started kneading,
butting his head into her hand. He was so annoying. Always looking for attention.

She closed the diary and placed it on the desk as she stroked the cat’s forehead, but even after putting the book aside, she was aware of an odd and lingering sense of urgency to . . .
what? To help the girl? To save her? Ridiculous.

Her first impulse when she’d started the diary was to read quickly to the end, but the girl’s handwriting was often hard to decipher, and her sentences were peppered with slang and
intriguing colloquialisms. It had been years since Ruth had lived in Japan, and while she still had a reasonable command of the spoken language, her vocabulary was out of date. In university, Ruth
had studied the Japanese classics—
The Tale of Genji
, Noh drama,
The Pillow Book
—literature going back hundreds and even thousands of years, but she was only vaguely
familiar with Japanese pop culture. Sometimes the girl made an effort to explain, but often she didn’t bother, so Ruth found herself logging on to the Internet to investigate and verify the
girl’s references, and before long, she had dragged out her old kanji dictionary, and was translating and annotating and scribbling notes about Akiba and maid cafés, otaku and hentai.
And then there was the anarchist feminist Zen Buddhist novelist nun.

She leaned forward and did an Amazon search for Jiko Yasutani but, as Nao had warned, found nothing. She googled Nao Yasutani and again came up with nothing. The cat, irked by her restlessness
and inattention, abandoned her lap. He didn’t like it when she went on the computer and used her fingers to type and scroll instead of to scratch his head. It was a waste of two perfectly
good hands as far as he was concerned, and so he went in search of Oliver.

She had better luck with D
ō
gen, whose masterwork,
Sh
ō
b
ō
genz
ō
, or the
Treasury of the True Dharma Eye
, did have an Amazon ranking, albeit nowhere near Proust’s. Of course, he’d lived in the early thirteenth
century, so he was older than Proust by almost seven hundred years. When she searched for “time being,” she learned that the phrase was used in the English title of Chapter 11 of the
Sh
ō
b
ō
genz
ō
, and she was able to locate several translations, along with commentaries,
online. The ancient Zen master had a nuanced and complex notion of time that she found poetic but somewhat opaque.
Time itself is being
, he wrote,
and all being is time
. . .
In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.

Ruth took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She took a sip of tea, her head so full of questions she barely noticed the tea had long grown cold. Who was this Nao Yasutani, and where was she
now? While the girl hadn’t come right out and said she was going to commit suicide, she’d certainly implied as much. Was she sitting on the edge of a mattress somewhere, fingering a
bottle of pills and a tall glass of water? Or had that hentai gotten to her first? Or perhaps she had decided
not
to kill herself, only to fall victim to the earthquake and tsunami
instead, although that didn’t make a lot of sense. The tsunami was in Tohoku, in northern Japan. Nao was writing in a maid café in Tokyo. What was she doing at that maid café in
the first place? Fifi’s? It sounded like a brothel.

She sat back in her chair and gazed out the window at the tiny stretch of horizon that she could see through a gap in the tall trees.
A pine tree is time,
D
ō
gen had written,
and bamboo is time. Mountains are time. Oceans are time . . .
Dark clouds hung low in the sky, forming an almost indiscernible line where they met the still, dull sheen of the ocean.
Gunmetal grey. On the far side of the Pacific lay the battered Japanese coastline. Entire towns had been crushed and dragged out to sea.
If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are
annihilated
. Was the girl out there somewhere in all that water, her body decomposed by now, redistributed by the waves?

Ruth looked at the sturdy red book with its tarnished gilt title embossed on the cover. It was lying on top of a tall messy stack of notes and manuscript pages, bristling with Post-its and wound
with cramped marginalia, which represented the memoir that she’d been working on for close to a decade. À la recherche du temps perdu, indeed. Unable to complete another novel, she had
decided instead to write about the years she had spent taking care of her mother, who’d suffered from Alzheimer’s. Now, looking at the pile of pages, she felt a quickening flush of
panic at the thought of all her own lost time, the confused mess she’d made of this draft, and the work that still needed to be done to sort it all out. What was she doing wasting precious
hours on someone else’s story?

She picked up the diary and, using the side of her thumb, started riffling through the pages. She wasn’t reading, in fact she was trying not to. She only wanted to ascertain whether the
handwriting continued all the way to the end, or if it petered out partway through. How many diaries and journals had she herself started and then abandoned? How many aborted novels languished in
folders on her hard drive? But to her surprise, although the color of the ink occasionally bled from purple to pink to black to blue and back to purple again, the writing itself never faltered,
growing smaller and if anything even denser, straight through to the very last, tightly packed page. The girl had run out of paper before she ran out of words.

And then?

Ruth snapped the book shut and closed her eyes for good measure to keep herself from cheating and reading the final sentence, but the question lingered, floating like a retinal burn in the
darkness of her mind:
What happens in the end?

2.

Muriel examined the barnacle growth on the outer freezer bag through the reading glasses she kept perched on her nose. “If I were you, I’d get Callie to take a look.
Maybe she can figure out how old these critters are, and from that you can calculate how long the bag’s been in the water.”

“Oliver thinks it’s the leading edge of drift from the tsunami,” Ruth said.

Muriel frowned. “I suppose it’s possible. Seems too quick, though. They’re starting to see the lighter stuff washing up in Alaska and Tofino, but we’re tucked back pretty
far inland here. Where did you say you found it?”

“At the south end of the beach, below Jap Ranch.”

No one on the island called it by that name anymore, but Muriel was an old-timer and knew the reference. The old homestead, one of the most beautiful places on the island, had once belonged to a
Japanese family, who were forced to sell when they were interned during the war. The property had changed hands several times since then, and now was owned by elderly Germans. Once Ruth heard the
nickname, she stubbornly persisted in using it. As a person of Japanese ancestry, she said, she had the right, and it was important not to let New Age correctness erase the history of the
island.

“Fine for you,” Oliver said. His family had emigrated from Germany. “Not so fine if I use it. It’s hardly fair.”

“Exactly,” Ruth said. “It wasn’t fair. My mom’s family were interned, too. Maybe I could lodge a land claim on behalf of my people. That property was stolen from
them. I could just go there and sit in their driveway and refuse to leave. Repossess the land and kick out the Germans.”

“What do you have against my people?” Oliver asked.

Their marriage was like this, an axial alliance—her people interned, his firebombed in Stuttgart—a small accidental consequence of a war fought before either of them was born.

“We’re by-products of the mid-twentieth century,” Oliver said.

“Who isn’t?”

“I doubt it’s from the tsunami,” Muriel said, placing the freezer bag back down on the table and turning her attention to the Hello Kitty lunchbox.
“More likely from a cruise ship, going up the Inside Passage, or maybe Japanese tourists.”

Pesto, who had been twining himself around Muriel’s legs, now jumped up onto her lap and took a swat at her thick grey braid, which hung over her shoulder like a snake. The end of the
braid was secured with a colorful beaded elastic, which Pesto found irresistible. He also liked her dangling earrings.

“I like the tsunami narrative,” Ruth said, frowning at the cat.

Muriel flicked the braid behind her back, out of the cat’s reach, and then rubbed the white patch between his ears to distract him. She peered at Ruth over the top of her glasses.
“Bad idea. Shouldn’t let your narrative preferences interfere with your forensic work.”

Muriel was a retired anthropologist, who studied middens. She knew a lot about garbage. She was also an avid beachcomber and was the person who’d found the severed foot. She prided herself
on her finds: bone fish hooks and lures, flint spearheads and arrowheads, and an assortment of stone tools for pounding and cutting. Most were First Nations artifacts, but she also had a collection
of old Japanese fishing floats that had detached from nets across the Pacific and washed up on the island’s shore. The floats were the size of large beach balls, murky globes blown from thick
tinted glass. They were beautiful, like escaped worlds.

“I’m a novelist,” Ruth said. “I can’t help it. My narrative preferences are all I’ve got.”

“Fair enough,” Muriel said. “But facts are facts, and establishing the provenance is important.” She scooped up the cat and dropped him onto the floor, then rested her
fingers on the latches on the sides of the lunchbox. Her fingers were decorated with heavy silver and turquoise rings, which looked incongruous next to Hello Kitty. “May I?” she
asked.

“Be my guest.”

On the phone, Muriel had asked to inspect the find, so Ruth had repacked the box as best she could. Now she felt a kind of tension in the air, but she wasn’t sure where it was coming from.
Something in the formality of Muriel’s request. The solemnity of her attitude as she removed the lid. The way she paused, almost ceremonially, before lifting the watch from the box, turning
it over and holding it to her ear.

“It’s broken,” Ruth said.

Muriel picked up the diary. She inspected the spine and then the cover. “Here’s where you’ll find your clues,” she said, opening it to a section somewhere in the middle.
“Have you started reading it?”

Watching Muriel handle the book, Ruth felt her uneasiness grow. “Well, yes. Only the first couple of pages. It’s not that interesting.” She took the letters from the box and
held them out. “These seem more promising. They’re older and may be more historically important, don’t you think?” Muriel laid down the diary and took the letters from
Ruth’s hand. “Unfortunately, I can’t read them,” Ruth added.

“The handwriting looks beautiful,” Muriel said, turning over the pages. “Have you shown them to Ayako?” Ayako was the young Japanese wife of an oyster farmer who lived on
the island.

“Yes,” Ruth said, slipping the diary below the table and out of sight. “But she said the handwriting’s hard even for her to read, and besides her English isn’t so
good. She did decipher the dates, though. She said they were written in 1944 and ’45, and I should try to find someone older, who was alive during the war.”

“Good luck,” Muriel said. “Has the language really changed that much?”

“Not the language. The people. Ayako said young people can’t read complex characters or write by hand anymore. They’ve grown up with computers.” Under the table, she
fingered the blunt edges of the diary. One corner was broken, and the cloth-encased cardboard wiggled like a loose tooth. Had Nao worried this corner between her fingertips, too?

Muriel shook her head. “Right,” she said. “It’s the same everywhere. Kids have terrible handwriting these days. They’re not even teaching it in schools
anymore.” She placed the letters next to the watch and the freezer bags on the table and looked over the collection. If she noticed the missing diary, she didn’t mention it.
“Well, thanks for showing me,” she said.

She heaved herself to her feet, brushed the cat hair from her lap, and then limped off toward the mud room. She’d gained some weight since her hip replacement and still found it hard to
get up and down. She was wearing an old Cowichan sweater and a long skirt, made out of some rough peasant fabric that covered the tops of her gum boots when she put them back on. She stomped her
feet in the boots and then looked up at Ruth, who had come to the door to see her off.