A Tale for the Time Being (13 page)

Okay. Now, where was I?

1.

A freeter, Ruth thought. That’s us. Frittering our lives away.

She closed the diary and let it rest on her stomach. Oliver was sleeping beside her. She’d been reading aloud to him when he’d fallen asleep, and rather than wake him, she continued
to read silently. She knew that the hikikomori story made him uneasy. It unsettled her, too.

Their move to the island was a withdrawal. The first New Year’s Eve, they’d spent on the couch, with her mother tucked under a blanket between them, drinking cheap sparkling wine and
watching the world turn 2000. The BBC was covering the millennial celebrations, tracking the time zones and slowly working its way westward around the planet. Every time a new burst of fireworks
lit up the television screen, her mother would lean forward.

“My, isn’t that pretty! What are we celebrating?”

“It’s the New Year, Mom.”

“Really? What year is it?”

“It’s the year 2000. It’s the new millennium.”

“No!” her mother would exclaim, slapping her knees and falling back against the couch. “My goodness. Imagine that.” And then she would close her eyes and doze off again
until the next burst of fireworks woke her, and she would sit up and lean forward.

“My, isn’t that pretty! What are we celebrating?”

By the time the new millennium finally reached their time zone, the rest of the planet had gone to bed, and Ruth had a pounding headache. We’re celebrating the End Times, Mom. The collapse
of the power grid and the world banking system. The Rapture and the end of the world . . .

My goodness. Imagine that.

It wasn’t all the silly Y2K prognostications that worried her. The anxieties that fueled her withdrawal were more diffuse and unnameable, and by the end of that first year, as she sat in
front of the television and watched the presidential elections grind to a close, she felt sure something horrible was about to happen. Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses
during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.

It was late. She put the diary aside and turned off the light. Next to her, she could hear Oliver’s breathing. A light rain pattered on the roof. When she closed her eyes, she could see
the image of a bright red Hello Kitty lunch-box bobbing on the dull grey waves.

2.

In the morning, armed with a large mug of coffee, she approached her memoir with a renewed sense of resolve. A rapprochement was what was needed. An unfinished book, left
unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will, and ruthless determination to tame it again. She kicked the cat off her chair, cleared her desktop, and centered the stack of
manuscript pages in front of her.

The cat, annoyed, jumped back onto her desk, but she swept him up in her hand, dropped him onto the floor, and then gave him a shove in the direction of the corridor.

“Go visit Oliver, Pest. He’s the one you love.”

The cat turned his back and stalked out of the room, tail in the air, as if leaving had been his intention in the first place.

Sometimes when she was having trouble focusing it helped to do timed sprints, setting short-term achievable goals for herself. Ever since Oliver had gotten the antique watch working, she’d
been wearing it every day, and now she unbuckled it and slipped it off her wrist. It was just before nine. Thirty minutes of work, followed by a ten-minute break. She saw that the second hand was
moving smoothly around its orbit, but she held the watch up to her ear just to make sure. She found the ticking reassuring. It was a handsome watch, late art deco, with its black face, bold
numerals, and luminous dial. The steel backing was pocked with age, but she could make out the kanji numerals—a serial number, or something else? Above the numbers were two other Japanese
characters. She recognized the first one. It was the kanji
, for
sky
. The second kanji,
, looked familiar, too, but she couldn’t recognize it in the context. She opened up her character dictionary and counted the strokes. Seven. She scanned the long list
of seven-stroke kanji until she found it.
Hei
, she read, meaning
soldier.

Sky soldier?

She woke up her computer and googled
sky soldier Japanese watch.
Hundreds of hits came back for websites where she could watch an anime series called Sky Soldier. Not useful.

She tried
antique watch
, and then
vintage watch
, and then
vintage military watch
. Bingo. There was an entire world of vintage military watch collectors.

Now, making another guess, she added
WWII
and
sky soldier
, but then on a hunch, she changed the latter to
kamikaze
and hit
RETURN
. The search
engine spun, and within moments she was on a community forum for military timepiece enthusiasts, reading about the provenance of the watch that she was holding in her hand, examining pictures of
similar watches, learning that they were manufactured by the Seiko Company during World War II, and were favored by the kamikaze troops. For obvious reasons, although they were manufactured in
large numbers, only a few survived. The watches were rare and avidly sought after by collectors. The numbers engraved on the back were indeed a serial number, not of the watch, but of the soldier
who wore it.

Haruki #1?

3.

She searched the Internet for Haruki Yasutani, cross-referencing his name with every search term she could recall from Nao’s diary:
sky
,
soldier
,
kamikaze
,
philosophy
,
French poetry
,
Tokyo University
. No luck. She moved on to the second Haruki, inputting new keywords:
computer programmer
,
origami
,
Sunnyvale
, but although she came up with a few Yasutanis, a couple of Harukis, and a handful of tech industry people with one of those names, she found none with both
names, and none who appeared to be related to either the kamikaze pilot or his nephew, Nao’s father.

Frustrating. She went back to the tsunami People Finder and looked up Haruki and Tomoko, but neither was listed among the missing and dead Yasutanis. That was a relief. She moved on, searching
for Zen temples in northern Japan, but she had little to go on, since she didn’t know where in the north the temple was located, or even to which sect of Zen it belonged. She tried adding the
name Jiko Yasutani to the temple search, along with terms like
anarchist
,
feminist
,
novelist
, and
nun
, in various combinations. Nothing. She looked for temples
up north that had been destroyed in the tsunami. There were several of these. Other temples had survived and were spearheading relief efforts.

The hands on the sky soldier watch circled the face, but she ignored them and read on, digging through articles posted back in 2011, in the months just after March 11. Crackpot religious leaders
were blaming the earthquake on angry gods who were punishing the Japanese for everything, from their materialism and worship of technology to their dependence on nuclear power and reckless
slaughter of whales. Angry parents in Fukushima were demanding to know why the government wasn’t doing anything to protect their children from radiation. The government was responding by
fiddling with the numbers and raising the levels of permissible exposure; meanwhile, nuclear plant workers, battling the meltdown at Fukushima, were dropping dead. A group calling themselves the
Senior Certain Death Squad,
⁵⁴
made up of retired engineers in their seventies and eighties, volunteered to replace the younger workers. The suicide
rate among people displaced by the fallout and tsunami was on the rise. She typed
certain death
and
suicide
and then remembered the train. She entered
Chuo Rapid Express
,
and finally
Harryki
, which in her hurry she mistyped, the forefinger of her left hand holding the
r
down too long, and her right finger overreaching the
u
and striking
the
y
instead, but before she could correct her mistakes, her pinky hit
ENTER
.

She groaned as the wheel on the search engine spun, and then gasped as she stared at the results.

4.

The website belonged to a professor of psychology at Stanford University, a Dr. Rongstad Leistiko. Dr. Leistiko was doing research on first-person narratives of suicide and
self-killing. He had posted an excerpt from a letter, written to him by one of his informants, a man by the name of “Harry.” The excerpt read as follows: