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) The fierce storm causes the power to go out across the entire island. Ruth and Oliver’s little house is usually a blaze of light, but on this night, the Jungle Crow sees that it is barely visible in the dim light shining out of a bedroom window.
Nao wrote that she felt invisible—and similarly, the Crow sees that Ruth’s house is barely visible. This is evidence of the strong metaphysical link between Nao and Ruth. It also brings up the idea that Nao “creates” Ruth as her reader—and since Nao doesn’t believe in her reader anymore, Ruth is fading.
Themes
(2) In the bedroom, Ruth reads Nao’s diary to Oliver and reaches the part when Nao is alone at the bus station. But when Ruth turns to the next page, her heart skips a beat when she sees that it is blank. She turns the pages frantically, but all the pages left in the diary are blank. This doesn’t add up—Ruth had previously checked and saw that Nao’s writing went all the way until the end of the diary.
This magical erasure of the diary’s words emphasizes the idea that the diary’s arrival and the connection between Nao and Ruth are supernatural. At the beginning of the diary, Nao wrote that she and her reader will “make magic” together, and the events happening now certainly seem magical.
Themes
Ruth tells Oliver that the words are gone—that they were there before, but that they’ve disappeared now. She thinks that Nao changed her mind and that her life was shortened. Oliver is quiet for a while, and then he says that this probably affects their own lives, too—if Nao stops writing to her readers, maybe her readers cease to exist.
Ruth understands that Nao has probably decided to kill herself, which is why the words disappeared. Oliver points out that their lives are closely linked to Nao’s, since they exist as her readers. He wonders if, much like Nao disappears for them when her words stop, they will disappear when Nao is no longer writing to them.
Themes
(3) Outside, the Jungle Crow sits in a tree and caws loudly, but it can’t be heard over the wind.
The Jungle Crow, which is a symbol of supernatural connections between characters, sounds out a warning, since the characters seem to be on the verge of fading away.
Themes
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(4) Ruth tells Oliver that he sounds crazy, but he says that he is being logical. He says that Ruth should go find the words—since she is a writer, it is her job to find “missing words.”
Ruth has been struggling to write her memoir, as she dislikes feeling stuck in her past. Oliver gives her a more interesting project, which is to save Nao by rewriting her life. This also underlines the power that a writer like Ruth has over her characters, like Nao.
Themes
(5) That night, Ruth has a strange dream that feels very real. In the dream, at first, she is in a forest and then finds herself in water. Words surround her, but she finds that are just sounds that have lost their meanings. Ruth realizes that she is in time, and that time has robbed the words of their meanings. When Ruth surfaces, she sees Jiko, who hands her glasses to Ruth. Immediately, she experiences Jiko’s memories, but Ruth wants to look for Nao, so she opens her mind and surrenders.
In the vivid dream that Ruth has, she feels like she has entered time itself and can therefore emerge at any point in the past, present, or future. She first emerges and meets Jiko, which is the wrong time, so she enters time again.
Themes
Ruth is transported to a hotel room, where she sees Nao wearing a man’s shirt and staring at herself in the mirror—but Nao disappears before Ruth can speak to her. Then, out of the corner of her eye, Ruth sees a quick movement that looks like a dark void, and she realizes it is the Jungle Crow, here to save her. The Crow leads her to a park in a busy city, where Ruth finds a man sitting on a bench, feeding crows. The Jungle Crow lands at his feet, and Ruth sits beside him.
Ruth thinks that she needs to meet Nao, but she turns out to be wrong about this. However, the Jungle Crow knows where she needs to go in order to change Nao’s fate, and he appears in her dream to guide Ruth to it. Haruki liked to sit on the park bench and feed crows, which is where the Jungle Crow takes Ruth. Haruki’s early connection to the crows now seems resonant, as this is the moment in time that the Jungle Crow chooses to take Ruth to.
Themes
The man nods at Ruth and asks her if she is the person he is waiting for. Ruth realizes that he is Haruki, and that he must be waiting for someone from his suicide club. She tells him that she and Nao are pen pals, and that Nao sent her to tell him not to kill himself. She says that Nao worries about him, and that Nao, too, plans to kill herself if Haruki commits suicide. Haruki is shocked to hear this
Ruth realizes that in order to save Nao’s life, she must save Haruki’s too, since Nao and Haruki’s lives are linked. Ruth tells Haruki the things that Nao couldn’t: that Nao loves him and worries about him, and that his death would break her. Haruki is shocked to hear this, because he seems to have assumed that he was completely worthless and unlovable.
Themes
Ruth tells Haruki that Nao is at the train station, on her way to see Jiko. Ruth wants to tell Haruki more, but she is transported again and finds herself on Jiko’s temple grounds. She is holding Haruki #1’s French composition book in her hands. Ruth makes her way to the altar in Jiko’s study and places the book inside the white box. Ruth sees Jiko appear in the doorway and lets herself fall into Jiko’s arms, “into silence, into darkness.”
Though Ruth has decided she wants to save Nao, she is unclear about how, exactly, to do this. She seems guided in her effort by some kind of supernatural power. The Crow is described earlier as a black “gap,” and now Jiko’s arms are “darkness,” suggesting that the Crow might be a spiritual manifestation of Jiko.
Themes
(6) The next morning, Ruth tells Oliver about her strange dream. She tells him that she tried to find Nao’s words but couldn’t, so she “came back empty-handed.” Oliver says that this sounds like an important dream, and he asks Ruth if she has checked Nao’s diary that morning.
Ruth thinks she has failed in her mission, until Oliver suggests that she check Nao’s diary. With this, he suggests that Ruth’s actions might have actually saved Nao, which speaks to the magical connection between writer and reader. In “rewriting” Nao’s story by saving Haruki, Ruth may have been able to save Nao as well.
Themes
