A Tale for the Time Being Read Online Free PDF Page B

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since Ruth had lived in Japan, and while she still had a reasonable command of the spoken language, her vocabulary was out of date.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