A Tale for the Time Being

(1) Ruth finally meets Benoit at the island’s garbage and recycling dump where he works. Benoit tells Ruth that she looks a lot like her mother, Masako. He says that he and Masako were “great friends.” It had slipped Ruth’s mind that her mother often visited the “Free Store” at the dump, which was filled with good-quality discarded items that anyone could take for free. Benoit would ask Masako if she’d “found any good bargains,” which always made her laugh.  

Benoit glances through the French booklet and asks Ruth if he can keep it so he can work on making a full translation. She feels hesitant to leave it with him, but she doesn’t want to offend him by refusing. Benoit notices the stack of Japanese letters too, and he recognizes that those letters and the French booklet were written by the same person, since the writer used the same pen for both. He guesses that the “sky soldier” probably wrote the booklet in French in order to keep his thoughts a secret from his squadron-mates.

(2) At home, Ruth tells Oliver about Benoit’s guess that Haruki #1 was the author of the letters and the booklet, and that he wrote the booklet in French to keep it a secret from the other soldiers. Oliver remarks that it is an “excellent security feature,” and as soon as Ruth hears him say this, she recalls that Nao wrote  the same thing about hiding her diary inside the Proust cover. She thinks that “Secret French diaries run in the family,” and she is faintly annoyed that Oliver made the connection while she didn’t.

(3) It’s been nine day since Ruth emailed Dr. Leistiko, and she still hasn’t heard back from him. She resends it with a note of apology for her persistence, but she then feels guilty for bothering the professor. Ruth also feels terrible for ignoring her memoir for so many days.

(4) That night, Oliver says that he has news for Ruth: a scientific article on quantum computing that appeared on his newsfeed is authored by someone named “H. Yasudani.” Ruth gets very excited and wants to email the author right away, but Oliver says that he already did that. He also tells Ruth that instead of searching for new leads, she should “focus on what’s tangible in the here and now” and have the Japanese letters translated.

(5) Oliver and Ruth make the trip to Arigato Sushi, a restaurant in Campbell River, which is the closest city to Whaletown. The owner of the restaurant, Akira Inoue, and his wife, Kimi, emigrated from Fukushima, Japan many years before. Right when they were planning to sell the restaurant and move back to Japan, the nuclear plant melted down, and their old city became uninhabitable. So, they decided to stay in Canada. Presently, Kimi glances through the bundle of letters that Ruth has brought, and she says that she can read the old-fashioned writing. She agrees to write down the translations for Ruth.