A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  . . . a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space, and me and Dad were astronauts, living in a spaceship, orbiting in the cold blackness.

  It was only four o’clock, but outside it was already growing dark. The rain had let up, but the air was still wet and cold. They walked across the sodden grass. Oliver held the car door for Muriel, when a sudden movement overhead caught his attention. He glanced up and then he pointed.

  “Look!”

  On the bough of the bigleaf maple, in the crepuscular shadows, sat the singular crow. It was glossy black, with a peculiar hump on its forehead and a long, thick curved beak.

  “How odd,” Muriel said. “It looks like a Jungle Crow.”

  “A subspecies, I think,” said Oliver. “Corvus japonensis . . .”

  “Also called a Large-billed Crow,” Muriel said. “How very odd. Do you think . . . ?”

  “I do,” Oliver said. “He just showed up one day. I’m guessing he rode over on the drift.”

  “A drop-in,” Muriel said. She knew about their aversion to drop-ins. She thought it was funny.

  The crow stretched its wings and then hopped a few feet along the bough.

  “How do you know it’s a he?” Ruth asked.

  Oliver shrugged, as though her question were immaterial, but Muriel nodded.

  “Good point,” she said. “He could be a she. Grandmother Crow, or T’Ets, in Sliammon. She’s one of the magical ancestors who can shape-shift and take animal or human form. She saved the life of her granddaughter when the girl got pregnant and her father ordered the tribe to abandon her. The father told the Raven P’a to extinguish all the fires, but T’Ets hid a glowing coal for her granddaughter in a shell and saved the girl’s life. The girl went on to give birth to seven puppies, who later took off their skins and turned into humans and became the Sliammon people, but that’s a whole other story.”

  She braced her arm against the frame of the car and slowly lowered herself into the driver’s seat. Ruth offered a hand, supporting her elbow.

  The crow watched the proceedings from its branch. When Muriel was safely inside, it stretched its beak and emitted a single harsh caw.

  “Goodbye to you, too,” Muriel said, starting the engine and waving her hand in its direction.

  The crow cocked its head as the car moved slowly down the long, winding driveway, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared around a bend, amid the towering trees. Oliver went to the garden to pick greens for dinner, but Ruth stood there by the woodpile a while longer, watching the crow.

  “Hey, Crow,” she said.

  The crow cocked its head. Ke, it replied. Ke, ke.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “What do you want?”

  But the crow didn’t answer this time. It just stared back at her with its jet-black eye. Waiting. Ruth felt sure the crow was waiting.

  Nao

  1.

  It’s hard to write about things that happened a long time ago in the past. When Jiko tells me exciting stories from her life, like when her idol, the famous anarchist and anti-imperialist terrorist Kanno Sugako, was hanged for treason, or when my great-uncle Haruki #1 died while carrying out a suicide bomber attack on an American warship, the stories seem so real while she’s talking, but later, when I sit down to write them, they slip away and become unreal again. The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?

  When old Jiko talks about the past, her eyes get all inward-turning, like she’s staring at something buried deep inside her body in the marrow of her bones. Her eyes are milky and blue because of her cataracts, and when she turns them inward, it’s like she’s moving into another world that’s frozen deep inside ice. Jiko calls her cataracts kuuge which means “flowers of emptiness.”55 I think that’s beautiful.

  Old Jiko’s past is very far away, but even if the past happened not so long ago, like my own happy life in Sunnyvale, it’s still hard to write about. That happy life seems realer than my real life now, but at the same time it’s like a memory belonging to a totally different Nao Yasutani. Maybe that Nao of the past never really existed, except in the imagination of this Nao of the present, sitting here in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

  If you’ve ever tried to keep a diary, then you’ll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction. It’s hopeless, really. Not that now is ever all that interesting. Now is usually just me, sitting in some dumpy maid café or on a stone bench at a temple on the way to school, moving a pen back and forth a hundred billion times across a page, trying to catch up with myself.

  When I was a little kid in Sunnyvale, I became obsessed with the word now. My mom and dad spoke Japanese at home, but everyone else spoke English, and sometimes I would get caught in between the two languages. When that happened, everyday words and their meanings suddenly became disconnected, and the world became strange and unreal. The word now always felt especially strange and unreal to me because it was me, at least the sound of it was. Nao was now and had this whole other meaning.

  In Japan, some words have kotodama,56 which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power. The kotodama of now felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail that looked something like this:

  NOW felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. I was just a kid, and I thought if I could truly grasp the meaning of the big fish NOW, I would be able to save little fish Naoko, but the word always slipped away from me.

  I guess I was about six or seven by then, and I used to sit in the backseat of our Volvo station wagon, looking out at the golf courses and shopping malls and housing developments and factories and salt ponds streaming by on the Bayshore Freeway, and in the distance the water of San Francisco Bay was all blue and sparkling, and I kept the window open so the hot, dry, smoggy haze could blow on my face while I whispered Now! . . . Now! . . . Now! . . . over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW.

  But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then.

  Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I’d start making it shorter . . . now, ow, oh, o . . . until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too.

  Stuff like this can drive you crazy. This is the kind of thing my dad thinks about all the time, reading his Great Minds of Western Philosophy, and after watching him I understand that you have to take care of your mind, even if it’s not a great one, because if you don’t, you can wind up with your head on the tracks.

  2.

  My dad’s birthday was in May, and my funeral was one month later. Dad was feeling pretty optimistic, because he’d made it though another year of life alive, and he’d just come in third place in the Great Bug Wars for his flying Cyclommatus imperator,57 which was a big deal because it’s really hard to fold the outstretched wings. So Dad was doing really well for a suicidal person, and I was doing okay, too, for a torture victim. The kids at school were still pretending I was invisible, only now everyone in the whole ninth grade was doing it, not just my homeroom class. I know this sounds pretty extreme, but in Japan it’s rather ordinary, and there’s even a name for it, which is zen-in shikato.58 So I was getting some major zen-in shikato action, and when I was in the schoolyard or in the
hallway or walking to my desk, I’d hear my classmates saying things like, “Transfer Student Yasutani hasn’t been to school in weeks!” They never called me Nao or Naoko. Only Transfer Student Yasutani or just Transfer Student, like I didn’t even have a name. “Is Transfer Student sick? Maybe Transfer Student has some disgusting American disease. Maybe the Health Ministry has quarantined her. Transfer Student should be quarantined. She’s a baikin.59 Ew, I hope she’s not contagious! She’s only contagious if you do it with her. Gross! She’s a ho. I wouldn’t do it with her! Yeah, that’s ’cause you’re impo. Shut up!”

  Typical. It was the kind of stuff they used to say directly to my face, only now they were saying it to each other, but still in front of me so I could hear. And they did other stuff, too. When you come into a Japanese school, there’s this place with lockers where you have to take off your outdoor shoes and put on your indoor slippers. They would wait until I had one shoe off, balancing on one foot, and then they’d walk into me and push me down and step on me like I wasn’t there. “Oooh, stinky!” they’d say. “Did someone step in dog shit?”

  Before physical education class, you have to change into your gym uniform, but my school here is so pathetic they don’t have real locker rooms like in Sunnyvale, so everyone changes in the classroom at their desk. The girls get one classroom and the boys get another, and you have to stand there and take off your clothes and put on these retarded uniforms, and when I had my clothes off, the girls would cover their noses and mouths and look around and say, “Nanka kusai yo!60 Did something die?” and maybe that’s what gave them the idea for the funeral.

  3.

  It was about a week before summer vacation, when I got the creepy feeling that something had changed once again. It’s all supersubtle, but you can tell, and if you’ve ever been the target of military psyops, or been tortured or hunted or stalked, you’ll know what I’m saying is true. You can read the signs because your life depends on it, only what was happening this time was basically nothing. I wasn’t getting pushed over and stepped on in the genkan61 anymore, and no one was making comments about me being smelly or sick. Instead, they were all walking around being real quiet and looking very sad, and when one of the nerdy little kids lost it and started giggling when I walked by, he quickly got punched. I knew something was about to go down, and it was making me crazy. Then during lunch I noticed they were passing something around, some kind of folded paper, like cards or something, but of course nobody gave me one, so I had to wait until clubs let out that afternoon to find out.

  I went home after school like usual, and I was hanging around the apartment, pretending to do my homework and trying to think of an excuse to go out again, when my dad started rummaging around for something, and then I heard him sigh, which meant that he was looking for his cigarettes and the pack was empty.

  “Urusai yo!” I said, grumpily. “Tabako katte koyo ka?”62

  For me to even offer was a big deal. My dad doesn’t like to go outside even though the cigarette vending machine is only a couple of blocks away, but normally I refuse to go buy cigarettes for him because of all the ways you can commit suicide, smoking has to be the stupidest and also the most expensive. I mean, why make a lot of rich tobacco companies even richer off of killing you, right? But this time his disgusting habit gave me the perfect excuse, and he was grateful, and he gave me a little extra money to buy myself a soda. I put on my running shoes instead of the plastic slippers we usually wear for doing errands in the neighborhood, and on the way out the door, I slipped a small kitchen knife into my pocket. I ran down the alleyway and ducked behind the row of vending machines that sell cigarettes and porno magazines and energy drinks.

  I was waiting for Daisuke-kun. He was in my homeroom and lived with his mom in our building. He was younger than me, a little stick insect of a kid, and his mom was a single mom and a bar hostess and poor, so he got picked on almost as much as I did. Daisuke-kun was truly pathetic, and after a while I saw him, holding his book bag up in front of him as he stumbled down the street, keeping his back to the high concrete wall. He was the kind of kid who even in long pants looked like he should be wearing shorts. Just the sight of his little pinhead swiveling around on his skinny neck, and his eyes bugging in all directions even though there was nobody following him, drove me crazy and made me really mad, so when he passed in front of the vending machines, I jumped out and grabbed him and pulled him into the alleyway, and I guess the adrenaline from my anger gave me superhuman strength, because taking him down was about as easy as plucking a sock off a line of laundry. Honestly, it felt great. I felt great. Powerful. Exactly the way I’d hoped I would feel when I fantasized about getting revenge. I knocked his school cap off and grabbed him by the hair and pushed him to his knees in front of me. He crumpled and froze there, the way a baby cockroach does when you turn on the kitchen light, just before you crush it with your slipper. I pulled his head up and held the little kitchen knife to his throat. The knife was sharp, and I could see the vein pulsing in his spindly neck. It would have been no effort at all to cut him. It would have meant nothing.

  “Nakami o misero!”63 I said, kicking his book bag with my toe. “Empty it!” My voice sounded low and rough, like a sukeban.64 I even surprised myself.

  He opened his book bag and began to dump the stuff inside at my feet. “I don’t have any more money,” he stammered. “They already took it all.”

  Of course they did. The powerful kids, led by a real sukeban named Reiko, ran a whole operation fleecing the pathetic kids like me and Daisuke.

  “I don’t need your stinking money,” I said. “I want the card.”

  “Card?”

  “The one they were handing out at school. I know you have it. Give it to me.” I kicked his Ultraman pencil case and sent the pens and pencils flying. He scrambled on his hands and knees, searching through his textbooks. Finally he handed me a card made of folded paper, careful not to make eye contact. I took it from him.

  “On your knees,” I said. “Close your eyes and bow your head. Sit on your hands.”

  He tucked his hands under his thighs. It was a posture he knew well, and so did I. It comes from a game called kagome kagome65 that little kids play, sort of a Japanese ring-around-the-rosy. The kid who’s It becomes the oni66 and has to kneel on the ground in the center, blindfolded, and all the other kids hold hands and skip around him in a circle, singing a song that goes,

  Kagome Kagome

  Kago no naka no tori wa

  Itsu itsu deyaru? Yoake no ban ni

  Tsuru to kame ga subetta.

  Ushiro no shoumen dare?

  In English it means

  Kagome, kagome,

  Bird in the cage,

  When, oh when, will you escape? In the evening of the dawn,

  Both Crane and Turtle have fallen down.

  Who is there, behind you now?

  At the end of the song, everybody stops circling, and the oni tries to guess which kid is standing behind him, and if he’s right, they switch places and the new kid becomes the oni.

  That’s how the game is supposed to be played, only the version we played at school was different. I guess you could say it’s kind of an upgraded version, called kagome rinchi,67 that’s very popular among junior high school kids today. In kagome rinchi, if you’re the oni, you have to kneel on the ground with your hands under your thighs, while the kids circle around, kicking and punching you and singing the kagome song. When the song is over, even if you could still use your voice, you wouldn’t dare guess the name of the kid behind you, because even if you guessed right, you would still be wrong and they’d start all over again. In kagome rinchi, once you’re the oni, you’re always the oni. The game usually ends when you can’t kneel anymore and you fall over.

  So Daisuke-kun was on his knees in the alley with his eyes squeezed shut, waiting for me to punch him or kick him or cut him with my kitchen knife, but I was taking my time. It was still early and nobody was in the alley at that ho
ur, since the hostesses can’t ever get it together to bring out their recycling before dark. I unfolded the card he’d given me. It was an announcement, written in nice brush calligraphy, for a funeral service. The handwriting was formal and neat, like a grown-up’s, and I wondered if maybe Ugawa Sensei had written it. The funeral service was going to be on the following day during the last homeroom period before our midterm summer vacation. The deceased was former transfer student Yasutani Naoko.

  Daisuke was still kneeling at my feet, head bowed, eyes closed. I grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head up and shoved the paper in front of his nose.

  “Does this make you happy?”

  “N-no,” he stuttered.

  “Usotsuke—!”68 I said, jerking on his hair. Of course the pathetic insect was lying. When you’re a nobody, you’re always happy when somebody else is getting tortured instead of you, and I wanted to punish him for that. His hair felt disgusting in my fingers, too coarse for a young kid his age, like old man’s hair on a young boy’s head, and it was greasy, too, like he’d used some of his mom’s boyfriend’s styling gel. It creeped me out. I tightened my grip and pulled harder until I could feel the follicles popping from their pores. I took the knife and pressed the blade against his throat. The skin was pale and almost bluish, a girl’s throat. The tendons were strung tight and trembling, and the veins throbbed against the thin metal serration. Time slowed down, and each moment unfolded into a future filled with infinite possibilities. It would be so easy. Slice the artery and watch the red blood spurt and stain the ground, draining his stupid nothing life from his stupid nothing body. Or release him. Let the pathetic insect go. It didn’t matter which. I pressed the blade a tiny bit harder. How much more pressure would it take? If you’ve ever examined skin cells under a microscope in biology class, you’ll understand how the serrated teeth of the knife could tease the cells apart until the blood started to seep. I thought about my funeral tomorrow, and how this would be a fine way to put a stop to it. Give them a real body. Not mine.