A Tale for the Time Being: Part IV, Chapter 2: Ruth Summary & Analysis

(1) Ruth goes to the little cemetery in Whaletown to tidy up her parents’ graves. After reading Nao’s account of Jiko’s funeral, Ruth wishes that she’d had a more elaborate ceremony to commemorate Masako’s passing. Her mother hadn’t wanted a funeral, and the whole thing had been a very low-key affair with just Ruth and Oliver present.

(2) Muriel visits Ruth and Oliver, hoping to spot the Jungle Crow. Oliver is trying to get a clear picture of the bird to send to a database in order to identify it. Muriel asks Ruth if she is done reading Nao’s diary, and she is shocked when Ruth admits that she still hasn’t gotten to the end. Ruth tells her how the pages went blank and about her weird dream.

Muriel says that Ruth’s descriptions sound interesting. She mentions that “in indigenous myth, crows are pretty powerful.” Muriel thinks that the Jungle Crow probably came to the island to lead Ruth in the dream, so that she could alter Nao’s story.

Muriel’s second theory is that the story is now Ruth’s—it has now become her story, rather than Nao’s, so Ruth has to discover how it ends. Ruth says that she want the responsibility of having so much control another person’s narrative, but Muriel laughs and says that this is what a novelist does.

Just then, Oliver spots the Jungle Crow. Muriel admires it, and Ruth recognizes it as the crow from her dream. Oliver takes a photo of it. Just then, the crow flies toward the deck they’re standing on, and it drops a hazelnut beside them before flying off. The nut gets wedged between two floorboards on the deck. When Oliver picks up the nut, he sees something moving under the floorboards. He immediately runs down the porch steps and crawls under the deck, and as Ruth and Muriel use a flashlight to try and see what he is up to, Ruth hears the cat’s faint mew. She tells Muriel that the cat has “come back from the dead.”

(3) The cat has been attacked by some wild animal, and its wounds are infected; it’s is so weak that it can’t even stand. Ruth and Oliver take it to the vet in town, who tells them that the prognosis isn’t good. On the way home, Oliver says that at least he now knows what happened to the stupid cat—not knowing was the worst part.

(4) Dr. Leistiko writes to Ruth again, saying that he just unearthed an old email from Haruki that he doesn’t even remember receiving. He says he’s sent Haruki an email and has even given him Ruth’s email ID. Dr. Leistiko forwards the old email from Haruki to Ruth, thinking that she might find it interesting, even though it is many years old and predates the tsunami.

(5) In his email to Dr. Leistiko, Haruki wrote that he and his family were doing well. His wife worked at a textbook company and also took up deep-sea diving as a hobby. His daughter, Nao, studied at an international school in Montreal, where she had become very interested in French language and culture. Haruki wrote that he was very grateful to his family for standing by him during the troubled times he experienced right after they moved back to Japan.

Haruki launched an internet start-up that worked with online encryption and security. He wrote that he got the idea from Nao, who was severely bullied in school in Japan, and whose classmates posted terrible things about her online. Haruki developed a computer program that he calls a “spider” that crawled through the internet and removed all traces of her, and Nao was happy that she could make a fresh start in Montreal.

Afterward, Haruki thought that his “cute little spider” could be useful to other people too. He ended up getting many clients who wanted to disappear from the internet. Haruki wrote that he understood that suicide was antiquated and unnecessary. His little spider could help people who no longer wanted to exist, doing so in a way that was much simpler than death. Haruki’s start-up was very successful, and he was leading a comfortable life.