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Part I, Chapter 4: Ruth
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Tale for the Time Being, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time, Impermanence, and the Present
The Difficulty of Communication
Life vs. Death
Coincidences and Connections
Sexual Perversion and Violence
Summary
Analysis
(1) Nao writes about having read somewhere that men born between April and June are more likely to commit suicide. Her father was born in May, and she says that this might explain why he’s tried to kill himself, though he hasn’t succeeded in doing so yet. Nao says that she and her dad are in the middle of a fight, because Nao has stopped going to school. She messed up her high school entrance exams and can now only go to a high school for low-achieving kids. Nao would rather become a nun like Jiko, but her parents insist that she graduates from high school first.
So far, Nao has revealed to her reader that she plans to kill herself. Here, she reveals that her father, too, seems to have the same idea and has even attempted suicide. There’s no indication that Nao’s father knows about her plan, but nevertheless, suicide is a connection between these two characters.
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(2) Nao writes that it isn’t really her fault that she messed up on the entrance exams. With her American educational background, she had no chance of getting into a good Japanese school. Her father wants her to apply to an international high school and then move to Canada, which he feels is like America but safer. Nao says that her dad used to love living in America, back when they lived in Sunnyvale, California. They moved there when Nao was three, and her dad was a well-paid programmer in Silicon Valley.
Nao’s life has undergone some big changes in the recent past, as her family has moved from California to Japan. Her struggles with adapting to her new schooling shows that change can be unpleasant and difficult. Nao’s father wants Nao to study in Canada, which must seem exciting for Ruth, who is reading this diary in Canada. This is yet another coincidental link between these two characters.
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However, when the dot-com bubble burst, Nao’s father’s company went bankrupt. The family lost their visas and had to move back to Japan. Since Nao’s father had taken much of his salary in stock options, they returned with no savings. Nao thought of herself as American and spoke very little Japanese, so the move was very hard on her. Since her parents couldn’t afford a fancy private school that would help Nao catch up to her Japanese grade level, they enrolled her in eighth grade at a public junior high school.
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Nao had no idea how to behave in a Japanese classroom, and she also struggled with the language. She was older and bigger than the other kids in her class, and she didn’t have an allowance or expensive things, since her parents were broke. For these reasons, Nao says, she was bullied relentlessly. She says that she wouldn’t have survived the bullying if Jiko hadn’t taught her how to develop her “superpower.”
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(3) The first time Nao’s father tried to commit suicide was around a year ago, just six months after they moved to Japan. They lived in a tiny, rundown two-room apartment, because the rent in Tokyo was so high and they couldn’t afford anything else. All their neighbors were bar hostesses who brought their dates back home at five in the morning. While Nao and her family ate breakfast, they could hear the neighbors moaning loudly as they had sex.
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In those days, Nao’s father would go out every day to look for employment, and Nao and her father would leave the apartment together every morning. While Nao’s father had been “cool” in Sunnyvale, riding his bike to work in jeans and sneakers, he now wore an ugly suit. Nao, too, felt foolish and unattractive in her school uniform.
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Nao and her father always took the long route as they walked together, and they often stopped at a tiny temple en route that Nao says was “a special place.” At the temple, she clapped her hands twice and bowed in front of a statue of the Buddha, like her father had shown her. Nao always wished that her father would soon find a job and that they could move back to Sunnyvale. If those two wishes couldn’t come true, at least that the kids at school would stop bullying her.
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Then, Nao’s father would walk her to school, and they would talk on the way. They were always polite but avoided talking about their problems in order to keep each other happy. As they got close to the school gates, Nao wanted to cling to her father and beg him not to leave, because she knew the kids inside were waiting to pick on her.
(4) As soon as Nao’s father left, her classmates started to move in. By the time she walked in through the doors of the school, she would usually be covered with cuts and bruises; her uniform would be untucked and full of tiny tears made with nail scissors that the girls kept in their pencil cases. Nao pretended to ignore them, but the bullying continued all day. Sometimes, her classmates pretended to gag as they walked by Nao’s desk and said that she smelled like a gaijin (“foreigner”). Other times, they sang demeaning, sexist rap lyrics to her.
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Literary Devices
Nao’s mother was almost never home when Nao got back from school. Her mother’s favorite pastime in those days was to clutch her “old Gucci handbag” and stare at the jellyfish in the city aquarium. In hindsight, Nao realizes that her mother was probably having a nervous breakdown at this time.
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(5) After a couple of months, Nao’s father announced that he’d gotten a job as a chief programmer at a start-up. His salary wasn’t high, but still, the family was overjoyed. Her father left for work in the mornings with Nao and came home late at night. Though Nao was still bullied at school, and the family still didn’t have much money, Nao felt good because she was filled with optimism for their future. Nao’s mother, too, stopped visiting the aquarium. Instead, she cleaned the apartment and even confronted the neighbors about the noise they made.
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At Christmas, the family ate snacks and watched TV, and Nao’s father told them about his work. Later, as Nao writes in her diary, she wonders how her father ever thought he’d get away with it. She wonders if perhaps he didn’t think at all or if he was crazy enough to believe his own story.
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Soon after Nao’s father started working again, her parents started arguing about money. Nao’s mother wanted her father to hand over his salary to her so she could manage it, but her father insisted that he deposited all of it in a high-yield account. Sometimes, he gave her mother a stack of yen bills, but never his whole salary. Right before Nao’s 15th birthday, her mother found stubs from the horse races in her father’s pocket and confronted him about it. He immediately left the house and got drunk on sake, and then he jumped in front of the Chuo Rapid Express train. Luckily, the conductor spotted him and was able to slam the brakes in time.
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Later, at home, Nao’s father confessed that he didn’t really have a job and that he instead spent all day sitting on a park bench, feeding the crows. Initially, he’d won some money at the horse races, but later he’d lost it all. Bowing down low, he apologized to Nao for having no money to buy her a birthday present. Later, Nao’s mother pretended that he’d only slipped down the train tracks since he’d been so drunk. Her father went along with this story, but Nao knows it isn’t true.
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(6) Nao writes about Jiko’s belief that everything that happens to a person is because of his or her karma—a kind of cosmic energy that’s influenced by what a person does and says, or even by what they think. A person’s karma is affected not just by their deeds and thoughts in this lifetime but by their past and future lives too. Nao thinks that perhaps it is her father’s karma to end up on a park bench feeding crows. She also can’t blame him for wanting to rush into the next lifetime.
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