A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki
First reviewed May 2013
I interpreted the title of this book as, “A story for a thing named ‘the time being’. Like, “Hey, Time Being, do you want to hear a tale?”
Sincerely. I thought this was going to be hard SciFi. And I do sort of think that the journal creates a “time being”—writing as time travel. But trying to refresh myself on what this book was about, 12 years after reading it, and I don’t really remember. So who is the time being? Honestly, it is me, trying to figure out what my past-self time-being was trying to say.
Having never read that author before, I wasn’t sure how much to take away that Ruth/character was Ruth/author. It reminded me of being ten and being given a Christopher Cat & Countee Cullin book by my Aunt. What was the deal with that cat? Was it really the author? I kind of bought it, enough that I remember the names after not thinking about them for thirty-plus years.
Anyway I have picked up another Ruth Ozeki book so I was reminded to bring this one over.
Sometimes a novel will play with its reader, blurring the edges of the story so they become soft barriers, permeable membranes where beginnings and endings freely intermingle with reality. A Tale for the Time Being contains appendices A-F, dozens of footnotes, and a complete bibliography. These are all legitimate components of fundamental publishing structure: decoupage so ubiquitous that the frame becomes invisible, its impact on the underlying content unnoticed. After the novel ends, the lingering question of where the story actually starts—the dedication? The list of the author’s prior works?—engulfs it all. Even the standard reality of the authors bio blurb, an unambiguously non-fiction sortie launched from the dust-jacket, is easily swallowed up by the story. The narrative has fled the pages, lives in the metes and bounds of whatever written material exists.
This is a tale of structure. Not the simple structure of construction, nor fluid demarcations questioning where a story ends or begin/s, but narrative structure built into narrative. The story begins with Naoto as narrator. She is quickly subsumed by the second, more direct entrant into the story, Ruth. Nao is a literary creature, literally, as she only exists as a voice from a journal. Ruth is reading her, even as we are reading Ruth; in no danger of being overwhelmed by a recursive feedback narrative, the Naoto readings are direct in structure but never in content. Even when it seems like Naoto is speaking directly to us, she is only speaking to Ruth. Ruth’s frequent annotation breaks in, a constant reminder that the Nao-narrative story is being filtered. We are to Ruth as she is to Naoto; a reflection, but also an interloper, a creator. Without us, Ruth would not exist. Without Ruth, neither could Naoto.
Nao is the first voice we hear:
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 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, it kind of broke my heart(31).
Even when not present, we never really escape Ruth—the annotations either insert the world of Ruth contemporaneously into Nao’s journal: 30. “I never think anyone gives a shit, “Oliver said. “Is that sad? I don’t think it’s sad.” or they function as a typical reference footnote: 31. “Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.” -Milan Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980.In these narrow moments, narrator-Ruth and author-Ruth conflate; who is citing Kundera? Did narrator-Ruth really write her husband Oliver’s comments as a footnote, or is that a simple concession to storytelling?
Here is where the boundaries of A Tale for the Time Being begin to blur—narrator-Ruth is a writer with prior published novels that are never referenced by name. Perhaps the “prior works by the author” page are hers? The dedication page cites Ruth’s mother. And while it seems easy to wipe away these ties as simple indulgences or self-insertions by the author, their attenuation after the swirling perspectives of Naoto and Ruth—the concessions to time a reader and writer must agree to make for fiction to work—allow for a bit of metaphysics.
The positioning of time as central to the flow of the story is fascinating—the temporal distance between Naoto and Ruth is frequently addressed. It summons to mind the distance between the reader and Ruth. The gulf between Naoto and the reader which, by virtue of the plot, should be the widest, is instead the least restrictive:
Akihabara means Field of Autumn Leaves, but the fields and leaves have all been replaced by electronics stores, and these days people call it Akiba or Electricity Town. I’d never really hung out there before. I thought it was where manga otaku and loser geeks like my dad went to sell their computer hardware when they ran out of money, but I was totally wrong. Akiba is wild and weirdly awesome. You walk through these narrow alleyways and shopping streets lined with stores and stalls spilling over with circuit boards and DVDs and transformers and gaming software and fetish props and manga models and inflatable sex dolls and bins filled with electronics and wigs and little maid costumes and schoolgirl bloomers.
Nao’s journal is always “now”: unsubtle in theory, in practice the juxtaposition between the steady march of Ruth’s narrative and Nao’s unceasing present-tense driving the story forward is delicate. Ruth doesn’t do much aside from muse about the journal; Naoto contains most of the movement that drives the plot forward. Yet Ruth moves through time, while Nao is static; Ruth is the reader’s reality, while Nao is constantly reduced to words on a page.
Which brings about the biggest misstep to an otherwise wonderful story—the last-minute introduction of quantum mechanics. Grounding the story in literary magic—the reduction of reading to inanimate words against the life of fiction within a reader’s mind—is more than enough to cover the fantastical elements introduced late into the plot. The tepid quantum mechanics that bridge the worlds of Ruth and Nao aren’t necessary. No explanation was required, and trying to reduce it to science is unfortunate. Having just read Time Reborn by Lee Smolin, perhaps my threshold for a shallow physics lesson is lower than average, but a continued emphasis on the timeless reach of narrative rather than a bland deus ex quantum physics would have been a far preferable engine for resolution.
When split narrators are done well, the reader tends to lament the end of one chapter as it heralds the switch to a different point of view. By the time that chapter ends, the feeling rises again—a mild disappointment clinging to each new beginning. You know there will be a tangential push before you can return to forward story motion from whichever narrator just finished. What A Tale for the Time Being does well is create that same feeling whether it’s Naoto or Ruth; whomever you’re with, you do not want your time to end.