All is Not as Well as It Ends
- By Amanda Seaman
In Ruth Ozeki’s intricate novel, A Tale for the Time Being, there are multiple strands running through the narrative, themes that span generations and continents. Nestled among the meditations on Buddhism, time, and cats is a powerful story of a young Japanese woman who is struggling to find a place for herself in the bleak urban landscape of contemporary Japan. The story of Nao, told in journal form, is a story within a story, one that first engages the narrator Ruth as well as the reader. Nao is fifteen when the story opens, a person suddenly lost when her father loses his job in the United States where she was raised and her family has to go back to Japan. More American than Japanese, Nao tries to fit back into Japanese society and relearn enough Japanese to take the high school entrance exam—a test that determines not only what high school she will attend but what the rest of her life will be like. Fail the exam and get into a poor high school and you will be relegated to a menial position for life. Nao is friendless and neglected by her parents, neither of whom have the time for her because of their own personal problems. The trials that Nao undergoes are those social problems of contemporary Japan that have been chronicled in the international media—examination hell, exquisitely sadistic Internet bullying, and casual prostitution. Yet all is not lost for Nao: her great grandmother, a nun, visits Nao and takes her on a visit to her temple overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Tohoku, the northeastern part of Japan.
Ozeki’s description of the displaced Nao and her struggles to understand a culture that is her birthright and yet is so alien captures the flat, matter-of-fact tone familiar to readers of Japanese contemporary girl’s fiction. (Reader of the novel will not be surprised to learn that Ozeki has also written an intro to a collection of contemporary Japanese women’s literature.) Recent novels by young Japanese women authors often describe their alienation from their family and friends and the degradation they subject themselves to in order to be able to feel any emotional connection. The young women in these stories seem to be adrift morally and spiritually, leaving the reader to wonder whether there was anything in Japanese society to anchor them. The emotional flatness of the characters in contemporary Japanese literature is part and parcel of a larger trend in popular culture that is characterized by meaninglessness or lacking content. As the critic Yumiko Iida describes it, there is a “representational crisis” in Japan in the 1990s (and beyond) in which there is “a visible gap, an allegorical failure between representation and its historical referent, between the form and its content, between image and its substance, between the self and the body, and so on” (Iida, 455).* This lack, Iida argues, is what allows for the social problems in Japan, the ones that women’s literature as well as the media addresses. In the beginning of Nao’s story, Ozeki paints Nao with the same brush, showing how she gradually cuts herself off, while people begin to pretend she is not even there. Yet Ozeki cannot give up on her character, rejecting the meaninglessness rampant in Nao’s life. While her great grandmother’s visit starts to rouse Nao from her living hell, it is the visit to the temple and Nao’s discovery of her own family history that finally revitalizes her.
The diary breaks off before Ruth and the reader learns what happens to Nao and her family. In the latter part of the book, Ruth’s desire to learn what has happened and to give meaning and form to Nao’s story drives the rest of the novel. Her investigation leads her to pull on different threads. It also reveals there are other genres in the novel—a mystery as well as a story of Ruth’s own mother, almost a fictionalized autobiography, like the Japanese “I-novel”. By unraveling what happens to Nao, Ozeki weaves back together the rent in Nao’s family whereby substance and history, the self and the body, are rejoined. The failures of individual characters are given new meanings and, in the end, we are given hope by what has happened to Nao and her family. In the end, things do turn out well for Ruth, for the cat, and for Nao, but in contemporary Japan, as the novel suggests, such is not always the case.
*Yumiko Iida, "Between the Technique of Living an Endless Routine and the Madness of Absolute Degree Zero: Japanese Identity and the Crisis of Modernity in 1990s," in positions: east asia culture critique Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 423-464.
Amanda Seaman is Director of the Program in Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her translations of Takahashi Takako, along with a critical introduction, appeared in MR 54.1 (2010).
