Themes
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) Oliver remarks that the part about the crows is interesting. Ruth shuts the diary, frustrated that after listening to all of Nao’s emotional revelations, Oliver is most struck by the crows. However, she patiently asks him what about the crows he finds interesting.
Ruth is irritated at Oliver’s reaction—but by keeping the channels of communication open by asking him about his thoughts rather than expressing her anger, Ruth ends up finding out useful information. This emphasizes the importance of communication and contrasts with Nao and her parents’ struggles to be open with one another.
Themes
Oliver says that Japanese crows look quite different from the Northwestern Crows that are native to Canada. On the day that Ruth found the freezer bag, Oliver had heard the crows around their house making a big noise. Up in the trees, he saw them harassing a smaller bird that was trying to join them—the bigger crows kept pecking at it and chasing it away. When Oliver saw the smaller bird up close, he thought it looked exactly like a Japanese crow. Now, he guesses that it must have ridden over on the flotsam, with the freezer bag. Ruth wonders aloud if that is possible, and Oliver answers that it is “an anomaly,” but that it is “not impossible.”
The Japanese crow seems to have mysteriously ended up on their island at the same time as the lunch box, which is a clue that something supernatural might be afoot. Oliver remarks that this is “an anomaly,” but that it is “not impossible.” It is also an eerie coincidence that Oliver and Nao’s father both have noteworthy encounters with Japanese crows. The novel seems to feature many of these “anomalies” that result in the characters forming connections with one another across time.
Themes
(2) Ruth thinks that Oliver himself is “an anomaly.” She often grows impatient with his wandering mind. However, Ruth is always glad when she follows Oliver’s thoughts, because he comes up with interesting ideas and connections—like his observations about the crow. Ruth and Oliver first met at an artists’ colony in the early 1990s. After the residency, Ruth moved back to New York City, while Oliver went back to the island farm in British Columbia where he taught permaculture. They emailed each other every day. As Ruth eagerly read his emails, she realized that she was in love with him.
Oliver thinks and communicates differently from other people, but Ruth is patient with him and is appreciative of his unique ideas. Their relationship seems to have been built on close communication from the very beginning, since Ruth specifically recalls that their daily emails paved the way to her falling in love with him.
Themes
That winter, Oliver and Ruth tried living together in New York—but by spring, they had decided to move to Oliver’s island instead. Presently, Ruth thinks that she yielded to Oliver persuading her, but she acknowledges that Canada’s healthcare system was a big draw too. Oliver had become sick with a long-lasting flulike illness, and healthcare in the U.S. was too expensive for them. Additionally, Ruth’s mother had Alzheimer’s and was in a facility in Connecticut, and Ruth couldn’t figure out how to care for an ailing mother in one country and a chronically-ill husband in another. So, she’d decided to move to Oliver’s island with her mother.
Even though Ruth was deeply in love with Oliver and wanted to be with him, she had to move from New York City to his lonely Canadian island after she married him. Given the ongoing parallels between Ruth and Nao, the reader can infer that Ruth will struggle with this change, much like Nao struggled with her family’s move to Japan.
Themes
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(3) Ruth soon realized that life on the island was very different from what she was used to. Whaletown wasn’t really a town—the province of British Columbia defined it as a “locality […] with a scattered population of 50 or less.” It had been a whaling station in the 19th century, though whales rarely came by anymore. Most of the whales in the region had been slaughtered for blubber while the rest had fled. Ruth thinks that whales, too, are “time beings.”
Ruth moved from New York City to Whaletown, which is so tiny that it isn’t even technically a “town”; she struggles to adjust to this change. Meanwhile, Ruth has internalized Nao’s ideas about change and impermanence and observes that “time beings” are everywhere—even in tiny Whaletown’s history.
Themes
(4) Ruth and Oliver’s house in Whaletown is set in a meadow carved out of a temperate rainforest. When Ruth first saw the gigantic trees that surrounded their house, she was so moved that she wept. She told Oliver that humans have spent barely any time on Earth compared to these trees, which were over 1,000 years old. Oliver was very happy to live here. Though he was weak and dizzy with his illness when they first moved in, he slowly became healthy enough to exercise.
The ancient trees in Whaletown remind Ruth of her own mortality, which shows that she was already thinking of her own impermanence even before reading Nao’s diary. However, Jiko would see even these ancient trees as “time beings”: even though they live much longer than people, they, too, will die.
Themes
Oliver is an environmental artist and is working on a project that he calls “the NeoEocene,” for which he is planting groves of trees that were native to area in the Eocene period, 55 million years ago. He is keeping global warming’s effects in mind as he does this, since the trees he is planting include warm weather trees like palm and ginkgo. However, Oliver will not know if his experiment will succeed, since he won’t live long enough to see the results. He doesn’t mind this, since he is patient and has accepted that human beings live relatively short lives.
In contrast to Ruth, who wept when she was reminded of her own mortality, Oliver has made peace with it. Though he is not spiritual like Jiko, he is similar to her in his acceptance of change and in his endeavors to make his present count by working on meaningful projects. Oliver acknowledges that the ancient trees on the island won’t last forever because of global warming. Instead of seeing this as a negative, he is planning for the future (which he won’t live to see) by planting trees that will do well on the island after its temperature rises as a result of global warming, many years in the future. This indicates that Oliver is completely accepting of change.
Themes
In contrast, Ruth is “neither patient nor accepting.” Fifteen years after moving out of New York City, Ruth’s mother has since passed away, and Ruth feels hemmed in by the island. She feels like she is in a dark fairy tale and has fallen into a “deep, comalike sleep.” As a novelist, Ruth misses the buzz of the city and being around people. She feels like her life is passing her by and wonders if she should leave the island that she’d hoped would be her home.
Ruth compares herself with Sleeping Beauty to describe how she feels stuck and asleep on the island—and her unhappiness is hampering her productivity as a writer. She feels like she is wasting her time and describes this as being “asleep.” Zen Master Dogen advises people to “wake up” and be conscious of the present moment—so Ruth is “asleep” in a spiritual sense as well since, she is wasting her present.
Themes
(5) For Ruth, leaving home means returning to the city. However, in the Buddhist sense, “home leaving” means leaving regular life behind and becoming a monk or nun. Zen Master Dogen writes about this in the Shōbōgenzō, in a chapter titled “The Merits of Home-Leaving.” In it, he says that even the tiniest moment in time gives a person an opportunity “to wake up and choose actions that will produce beneficial karma.” Dogen’s true message is that “life is fleeting.” He exhorts his disciples to “Wake up now! / And now! / And now!”
Zen Master Dogen wants his disciples to understand that since “life is fleeting,” every moment is precious. He thinks of those who do not understand this as being “asleep,” in the same way that Ruth considers herself as wasting time on the island and being asleep. Dogen exhorts his disciples to “wake up” and use every moment wisely.
Themes
(6) Whenever Ruth tries to reread and edit her memoir, she feels “inexplicably sleepy.” It’s been about a year since she’s added a single word to it. The project seemed like a good idea when Ruth’s mother was still alive— now, however, the pages embarrass Ruth when she reads them.
Ruth is wasting her time by wallowing in the past. The memoir is a symbol of her past, and she is “sleepy” when she tries to work on it. Dogen would advise Ruth to “wake up” and make use of her present, but she is stuck in the past and struggling to let go of it.
Themes
Ruth has tried to pace herself as she reads Nao’s diary, so that she can focus on her own writing too. However, she had spent her morning on the internet, looking for any Yasutanis who might have been victims of the earthquake and tsunami. Ruth hadn’t found anyone named Jiko or Naoko, and since she didn’t know Nao’s parents’ names, she had spent her time looking for likely matches. Ruth ended up seeing pictures of many people who’d lost their lives in the tsunami—but she didn’t find the Yasutanis.
Nao’s diary beckons to Ruth, encouraging her to stop working on her memoir and to instead become more aware of her time and focus on using it wisely. Meanwhile, when Ruth sees images of the tsunami, she is shocked by the immense destruction that it caused—which serves as a reminder that change can be terrifying and can cause immense suffering. The changes in Ruth’s and Nao’s lives mirror this, though their suffering is smaller in scale.
Themes
(7) That night, Oliver tells Ruth that he’s been reading about Japanese Jungle Crows—he’s discovered that they’re very clever birds. In Japan, the crows have learned the trash pickup schedules, and they show up on time to rip up trash bags and scavenge for food. They build their nests on electricity wires, which causes many power outages in Tokyo. The power company dismantles their nests, so the crows have taken to building dummy nests as decoys.
Again, Oliver’s interest in crows aligns him with Nao’s father, connect characters who live in different places and in different time periods.
Themes
