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) Ruth closes Nao’s diary after she’s done reading it. When she was on the penultimate page, she’d hesitated before turning it, wondering if the pages would multiply. But they hadn’t—she’d reached the end. Ruth wonders about how the diary had gone blank, and how she could have rescued the words and characters through her dream. She thinks of Nao’s words at the beginning of the diary, when she’d written to her reader, “Together we’ll make magic…” Ruth ends up wondering, “Who had conjured whom?” Ruth wonders if she is the dream, and if Nao created Ruth by imagining her reader.
After Ruth finishes the diary, she’s inclined to believe Nao’s words that she and Ruth would end up making magic together, since Ruth had supernatural experiences as she read the diary. Ruth wonders if she exists only as Nao’s creation, as her reader—much like the past version of Nao, the writer, in the diary only exists in Ruth’s mind as she reads. The novel implies this idea is certainly a possibility: previously, when Nao was hopelessly waiting for the bus to Jiko’s, she implied that she would kill herself. And after Ruth read this, the Jungle Crow noticed that Ruth’s house was barely visible in the darkness, suggesting that Ruth, too, was fading away. Ruth couldn’t exist without Nao, since she was the reader that Nao conjured up. This idea shows the symbiotic relationship between a writer and her reader: one can’t exist without the other, and they are intimately connected by the story they share.
Themes
(2) The next morning, Oliver finishes reading Nao’s diary as well. Afterward, Ruth asks him if he thinks she’s crazy to believe that she changed Nao’s life by visiting Haruki in her dream—and if Oliver even believed Ruth when she made these claims. Oliver says that he never disbelieved her. He tells her that there is a “quantum theory of multiple worlds,” which essentially states that “everything that’s possible will happen, or perhaps already has.” Ruth says that she doesn’t quite understand, and Oliver replies that no does, because the math behind it is very complicated. He then brings up Schrödinger’s cat.
Oliver seems open to the idea of the “quantum theory of multiple worlds,” which suggests that there are multiple parallel worlds and that all possibilities can exist in these worlds. So, Oliver thinks it is entirely possible that Ruth visited one of these worlds and changed Nao’s fate. He explains more about quantum mechanics in the sections that follow, beginning with an explanation of Schrödinger’s cat.
Themes
(3) Ruth knows a little about Schrödinger’s cat. She knows that quantum physics focuses on matter and energy at a microscopic level, which is often different from how it behaves on a macroscopic level. Ruth knows that in physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment, he’d said that if a cat “behaved like subatomic particles” and was shut in a box with a mechanism that might kill it, then the cat would be both dead and alive until an observer opens the box. As soon as the box is opened, the cat would be either alive or dead.
The main point of Schrödinger’s thought experiment is that as long as one leaves possibilities open, more than one thing can simultaneously occur. He didn’t mean that a real cat can be simultaneously dead and alive, but that if a cat “behaved like subatomic particles,” then this could happen, since subatomic particles behave in a different manner than cats. However, this experiment will remind readers of Oliver’s lost cat, and how not knowing if it was dead or alive drove Oliver crazy. When he found the cat, it was barely alive, or half-dead—in other words, both dead and alive. This seems to be a real-life illustration of Schrödinger’s idea.
Themes
Ruth asks Oliver if this means that the observer would kill the cat by looking at it. Oliver explains that this isn’t the right idea, and that Schrödinger was trying to illustrate the “observer paradox.” On a subatomic level, any one particle can exist in many different forms and many different places at once. This is called “superposition.” However, particles only exist in superposition when no one is looking at them. When scientists try to measure it, the superposition seems to collapse, and the particle exists in only one location.
Oliver explains the puzzling ways in which subatomic particles behave, which makes them very hard to measure. This seems to suggest that there are mysteries even in science that cannot be measured and explained, so supernatural or spiritual events cannot simply be dismissed. Just because they are unexplainable does not make them any less “real.”
Themes
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Later, another physicist named Hugh Everett came up with the theory that this collapse isn’t actually what happens. When the superposed quantum particle is observed, “it branches.” This means that cat is dead and alive, and these two different versions of it now exist in two different worlds. This implies that the observer splits too—there is an observer in one world observing the dead cat, and another observer in another world observing a living cat. The selves in various worlds can’t communicate with one another, because they do not remember the other worlds and other selves.
Hugh Everett’s theory suggests that there are as many worlds and selves as there are ideas and possibilities—a dizzying thought that Ruth and Oliver seem to embrace. All these worlds and selves cannot communicate, but Ruth seemed to have broken through this barrier in her dreams.
Themes
(4) Ruth wonders if the quantum physics theory of splitting selves could explain her poof memory. She wonders if Dogen figured all this out years ago when he’d written, “To study the Way is to study the self.” To study the self, one had to sit zazen, which to Ruth seems like a way of observing the self. Dogen had continued, “To study the self is to forget the self.” Ruth thinks that this means one’s “sense of being a solid, singular self” would vanish, and one could be part of “an open-ended quantum array.”
Ruth has always been anxious about her memory, because every time she forgets something, she worries that she is getting Alzheimer’s like her mother. However, now she considers the possibility of her faulty memory being a by-product of having multiple selves in multiple worlds. Ruth also thinks that it might be beneficial to forget her identity as a “singular self” and instead travel freely between “an open-ended quantum array” of multiple worlds, like Oliver explained. In this way, she ties ideas of quantum physics with Dogen’s Zen Buddhist teachings.
Themes
(5) Ruth wonders if Nao is really alive, in this world. She wonders how the diary, the letters, and the watch ended up in a lunch box in the ocean. Ruth thinks that she expected to know the answers to those questions, and she is frustrated that she still has no idea and has no way to find out.
At the end of the novel, Ruth has some answers, but not all of them. The biggest mystery is why the contents of the lunch box were thrown away at all, and Ruth still has no idea. This suggests that, much like no one can fully grasp the math behind quantum physics, some coincidences and seemingly magical events in life cannot be explained or analyzed.
Themes
Oliver tells Ruth that perhaps, in another world, Ruth is married to someone industrious and wealthy and has a nice life in New York City. Instead, in this world, she is stuck with Oliver and his cat on a desolate island. Ruth says that by even suggesting that, Oliver has “sentenced” her to another life in another world, with an insufferable husband. Oliver laughs and asks Ruth if she is happy in this world. She says she is happy, “at least for now.” This answer satisfies Oliver.
Oliver is concerned about being a “loser,” since he doesn’t make much money, and he knows that Ruth is unhappy on the island. However, just the possibility of living with a rich, successful man with corporate career strikes Ruth as being a kind of jail sentence—and she realizes that she is, in fact, happy with Oliver. She acknowledges, however, that she is happy with him for “the time being,” since she has learned that the present moment is all that anyone can know about. At any moment, everything could change.
Themes
