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) After 9/11, Nao’s classmates initially seemed sympathetic toward her because of her connection to America. But by the end of September, they started bullying her again. One day, Nao got her period when she was at school. She wasn’t prepared for it, so she rushed to the bathroom to wad some toilet paper into a makeshift pad. She heard a scrabbling noise in the stall next to hers and looked up to see one of her classmates taking a video of Nao on a cellphone.
Nao found the constant changes in her classmates’ behavior difficult because her days at school were unpredictable. After some seemingly calm days, she was stunned by the cruel and surprising turn they took.
Themes
Nao tried to leave the bathroom, but Reiko and her sidekicks blocked her path. Daisuke was recording the whole encounter with a video camera. Nao’s classmates tied her skirt above her head with a jump rope. Nao couldn’t see anything through her skirt, which covered her face completely. Her classmates threw her on the floor and pulled down her panties. They were excited to see bloodstains in her underwear. and one of them said that they would “get more for stains.” Reiko instructed Daisuke to rape Nao since they wanted to make a rape video. But Daisuke was too terrified to do anything, and Nao heard him run away.
While Nao’s classmates were always cruel to her, this incident was still shocking because of its violent nature. Nao’s classmates were very aware of the online market for violent pornography and fetish items, as they planned to film Daisuke raping her and seemingly planned on selling her bloodstained underwear. This incident gives readers insight into why Nao has a pessimistic view of sex: her status as a vulnerable young woman has made her vulnerable to sexual violence like this.
Themes
While Nao’s classmates were discussing who could rape her, Nao started thinking about Haruki #1 and these thoughts gave her courage. She summoned up her “superpower” and started zazen. Immediately, her classmates seemed like the mosquitoes that Jiko taught her to ignore. One of her classmates got nervous that Nao wasn’t moving, so they all ran away.
While zazen wasn’t a “superpower” in the sense that it actually protected Nao from the dangerous situation she was in, it did help her to endure and distance herself from her suffering. Jiko taught her to even let the mosquitoes at the temple bite her, and Nao used this lesson to refuse to be bothered by her classmates’ violence. In a sense, zazen did end up helping Nao: her calm breathing frightened her classmates, who fled the bathroom because they were worried that she was dead.
Themes
That evening, one of Nao’s classmates emailed her a link to the video. Nao was happy to see that her face wasn’t clear in it. Next to the video was a link to bid on her bloodstained panties on an auction site; Nao was creeped out by the number of bids that hentais were already placing on it.
Nao was in her school uniform in the video and was clearly being abused and was struggling against her classmates. The market for videos like these, and for her bloodstained panties, is evidence of perversion and violence in society. Young, naïve women like Nao are in constant danger.
Themes
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(2) Nao writes that she was the one who found her dad after he attempted to kill himself. After the “Panty Incident,” she’d stopped going to school. Instead, she left home in her school uniform every morning and then changed into her street clothes at an internet café. All day, she hung out at stores and coffee shops. On the day the bidding ended on her panties, she was sickened at the thought that some hentai would soon own them. To cheer herself up, she went shopping at a boutique, where she found and bought the diary hidden inside the cover of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.
Nao was traumatized when she was almost raped and was disgusted that her panties would soon be owned by a sexual pervert. Still, she was so convinced that her parents would be of no help in these matters that she didn’t even try to tell them what happened. This shows the extent of Nao’s loneliness, as she’d rather write about her problems in a diary than confide in her own parents.
Themes
However, when Nao got home, she immediately knew that something was wrong: the house was silent, and her father was missing. She finally found him in the bathroom, face down in a puddle of vomit. Nao called the ambulance, and the paramedics took him away—Haruki wasn’t dead yet, but the paramedics didn’t answer when Nao asked if he would live.
In addition to all the problems Nao faced at school, she now had to now deal with Haruki’s suicide attempt as well. All this was undoubtedly difficult for a young girl to handle. The reader knows that Nao will later become suicidal herself, and witnessing her father like this certainly contributed to Nao’s feelings of hopelessness and despair.
Themes
Nao tried to reach Tomoko but got her voicemail, so she texted her instead. Nao saw one of her father’s philosophy books on the table, and she found a note inside it written on Nao’s Gloomy Bear stationery. She put it in her pocket because she didn’t feel ready to read it yet. Also, she felt guilty because she might be responsible for Haruki’s death, since she was cruel to him. She mopped up the vomit in the bathroom, thinking it was weird that she had “Two nasty Toilet Incidents” in one week.
Previously, Nao told Haruki that he should stop feeling sorry for himself and that he should try to be more like Haruki #1. Now, she worried that her words hurt him so deeply that he attempted suicide. Nao and Haruki’s relationship is filled with misunderstandings and miscommunication, as the true reason for Haruki’s suicide is has nothing to do with Nao’s words (as the reader will learn later).
Themes
Nao’s mother eventually called her back, explaining that she had been in a meeting earlier, and Nao filled her in. Later, Nao opened her father’s note: he had written that he would “make [himself] ridiculous” in his own eyes if he “clung to life and hugged it when it has no more to offer.” Nao recognized this as a Socrates quote, because her father had told her about it while he was reading his philosophy books. Haruki had written a second line below this, which was that he would “make [himself] ridiculous in the eyes of others” if he “clung to life and hugged it when [he had] no more to offer.”
Even though Haruki and Nao never discussed their personal troubles, they did talk about ideas that interested them. Nao must have enjoyed these conversations, since she remembered details like the Socrates quote. Haruki seemed to believe not only that life had no more to offer—which was Socrates’ idea—but also added his own quote to it that said that he had no more to offer. The second line seemed to more closely express his reason for committing suicide: he felt ineffective and powerless, and therefore ridiculous.
Themes
Immediately, Nao had a horrible thought and rushed to the computer, and she saw that the auction site with her panties for sale was on the computer. Her dad must have found it after she’d forgotten to clear the cache. Nao saw that the auction had ended and that someone called “Lolicom73” had won the auction. A bidder called “C.imperator” had come close to winning but had lost at the last moment. Nao went to the bathroom and threw up.
Haruki was most likely “C.imperator,” since it references the Latin name for the staghorn beetle Cyclommatus imperator—the beetle that Haruki made and won a prize for in the origami contest. By writing that he had “no more to offer,” Haruki probably meant that he had no more money to place a higher bid on Nao’s panties so he could prevent a pervert from buying them. It seems that Nao’s suffering, and Haruki’s inability to protect her, is what actually drove him to suicide. Nao deciphered Haruki’s meaning from his rather cryptic message, which shows that she understood him very well, even though they didn’t really speak about their feelings.
Themes
At the hospital, the doctors pumped Haruki’s stomach, and he lived. After he was discharged, Haruki apologized to Nao and Tomoko, and he said that he took the extra pills by mistake. Nao’s mother looked relieved and agreed with him that it was a mistake. Nao, too, pretended to believe this story.
Once again, the family agreed to bury the painful truth in favor of a convenient lie. In doing so, they only further perpetuated the lack of communication and emotional intimacy that exacerbated Haruki’s mental health problems in the first place.
Themes
That night, after Nao’s mother went to bed, Nao gave her father a note written on Gloomy Bear stationery. He looked terrified to open it, but Nao told him he’d better read it. Instead of his own note, Nao wrote another note on the same stationery. She wrote that his uncle “Haruki #1 would not keep screwing up like this,” and that if her father was going to do something, he should “do it properly.” Her father agreed that Nao was right.
Nao was upset that Haruki tried to kill himself, and in her anger, she ended up telling him the exact opposite of what she wanted to. Instead of saying that she loved him and was hurt that he wanted to kill himself and leave her, she told him he should “do it properly,” meaning that he should stop bungling his suicide attempts. As a result, Haruki ended up assuming that she would be happier without him.
Themes
After her parents were asleep, Nao went to the bathroom and shaved her head. She sat zazen for the rest of the night, and she got dressed and left the apartment as soon as it was light out. Nao wore a hoodie with the hood up under her uniform blazer.
Haruki’s suicide attempt, as well as the auction of her panties, triggered a change in Nao. Rather than continuing to feel like a victim, Nao decided to take back some control over her body. By shaving her head, Nao wanted to discard a characteristic that marked her as feminine and take on the non-sexual appearance of a Buddhist nun.
Themes
When Nao walked into her classroom, she could hear Reiko and her friends giggling about the auction and the panties. Nao climbed onto her desk and lowered her hood, and her classmates gasped. Nao says the “superpower” of her bald head seemed to radiate throughout the classroom, and that she watched her classmates “tremble.” She opened her mouth and let out a fierce cry, causing her classmates to cover their ears with their hands. Then, Nao stopped because she pitied them. She walked to the front of the class and bowed deeply to the teacher and her classmates. Then, Nao left, knowing that she’d never return.
Nao writes that her actions in the classroom terrified her classmates, and that she only stopped screaming while standing atop her desk because she pitied them. This was clearly an empowering moment for Nao—she felt like she was telling off the world for constantly mistreating her. However, her sense of power was in her own head. It was very unlikely that her classmates actually “trembled” when she revealed her bald head, or that her scream hurt their ears. Like zazen, which is not truly a “superpower” but helps Nao bear her troubles better, this moment was a triumphant for Nao even though it most likely did not affect the others in the way Nao perceived it.
Themes
(3) Nao told her parents that she decided to drop out of school to become a nun. Nao’s mother was very upset, and the conversation turned into a huge fight. Finally, Nao agreed to at least take the entrance exams, though she was sure she would do badly.
Nao’s parents were upset at Na’s decision to stop attending school, though they didn’t ask her what caused her to make this decision. If they know about the terrible bullying and sexual violence Nao had to endure at school, they would likely be sympathetic. This once again shows that the family did not communicate well—rather than trying to understand what Nao is going through, their angry response only deepens her sorrows.
Themes
Later that week, at the public baths, one of the bar hostesses who lived in the apartments next door told Nao that she had a pretty head. Nao replied that she didn’t “give a shit about pretty” and that she was a “superhero.” But then, she ended up confiding in the hostess that Tomoko was upset that she’d shaved her head and wanted to get her a wig. The hostess, who said her name was Babette, offered to take Nao to a nice wig shop.
Babette called Nao’s head “pretty,” which was exactly what Nao didn’t want to be, since she shaved her head to prevent herself from being sexually objectified again. However, after protesting against this compliment, Nao ended up talking with Babette and confiding in her—mainly because Nao was so lonely and had absolutely no one else to talk to.
Themes
Nao and Babette took a train to Akiba to the wig shop. Nao had never been to Akiba before, and she found the hustle and bustle of it very exciting. Soon, they passed a DVD store in which all the TVs were playing a show called “INSECT GLADIATORS!”—a show documenting insects in a terrarium fighting each other to the death. Nao watched as a staghorn beetle was stung to death by a yellow scorpion. The commentator excitedly said that the beetle was “the loser” and jubilantly said that it was dead. Nao started to cry.
Nao was clearly shaken by watching the staghorn beetle being killed. The beetle likely reminded Nao of Haruki, since this was the insect he made and won a prize for in the origami contest. The Latin name of this beetle was also the screen name Haruki had used when he tried to bid on Nao’s panties to try to stop a pervert from buying them. But he lost the auction, and he felt so helpless about it that he’d tried to kill himself. With these associations in mind, Nao couldn’t take it when she heard the commentator of the show calling the beetle a “loser” and delighting in its death. Nao loved Haruki and appreciated his gesture of bidding on her panties, so the idea of his death saddened her.
Themes
Nao crouched down by the store and wept. Babette stood by her and occasionally gave Nao’s bald head a gentle tap. Later, Babette helped Nao pick out a wig and some other clothes. Nao writes that Babette really knows how to take care of her.
Nao was very lonely and deeply appreciated Babette’s small gestures of friendship. But the reader knows that Nao is young and somewhat naïve—it’s not yet clear whether Babette is really trustworthy, or if she, too, will take advantage of Nao.
Themes
