A Tale For The Time Being

Ruth has gone to visit her mother’s grave in Whaletown and thinks back to her mother’s death. After her mother was cremated, they took her ashes and buried them in the cemetery in Whaletown near their house. Later, Ruth and Oliver visit Muriel. Muriel is surprised to hear that Ruth has not yet finished reading the diary. Ruth explains that the ending keeps changing; sometimes there are new entries and sometimes there aren’t. Suddenly, they spot Pesto the cat, who has been attacked and badly hurt. Oliver is clearly upset but refuses to take Pesto to the mainland with Ruth because he is certain he will die anyway. Ruth finally convinces him to go with her on the ferry to take Pesto the vet.

Ruth receives another email from the professor at Stanford informing her about an email from his friend “Harry” in Japan. In this email, Harry tells the professor that he has gotten through his “trouble times” (381) and that he and his family are doing well. His wife still works at the textbook company, and his daughter ended up getting a “good scholarship for an international high school in Montreal” (382). Harry succeeded in launching a new start-up, “which is an online encryption and security system called Mu-Mu Vital Hygienics” (382). He invented the system to help his daughter erase the horrifying videos that her classmates posted of her on the Internet. As a result, Naoko was able to make a fresh start in Canada. The system works by sending a “spider” to erase all evidence of a person’s existence on the Internet over time; the most complex method available can even travel through times and worlds to erase all evidence of a person’s past. With this system the need for suicide disappears because the Mu-Mu spider “can neatly undo you if you stop wanting to be” (383). 

Nao begins the last section of her diary by remarking on how much she will miss the reader, even though they have never met. She is almost at the end of the À la recherche du temps perdu notebook and will have to wrap up her story. After Jiko’s funeral, her dad takes her to Disneyland. When they get home, they work together on reading Haruki #1’s diary with the help of a graduate student studying French poetry. They are surprised to learn that Haruki #1 did not actually carry out the suicide mission but instead “flew into the waves” so he would not cause any more suffering. After reading the diary, her dad begins to cry uncontrollably and tells her about how he lost his job in Sunnydale because of his concerns about the weapons he was helping to design. He understands how his uncle felt because he too did not want to contribute to the suffering of his country’s enemies. Nao decides to tell her dad everything that happened to her while she was being bullied by her classmates. He starts spending his days working on computer programming, his true “superpower” (389). Nao now knows that she and her dad are no longer contemplating suicide, and she has resolved to buy a new blank book and write the story of Jiko’s life. She ends the diary by stating that she has just found out that Marcel Proust wrote not only À la recherche du temps perdu but also Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained). 

Ruth has finally finished reading Nao’s diary. She and Oliver have returned from the mainland with Pesto, who has been treated for his injuries and is recovering. Ruth says to Oliver that it seems as if the Jungle Crow led her back in time to stop Nao’s dad from committing suicide and put Haruki #1’s secret diary in the box on Jiko’s altar. She knows it doesn’t sound rational, she believes that this may have happened, as improbable as it seems. Ruth then asks Oliver if he believes that Nao’s dad’s computer program, which erases people’s existence across time and worlds, could be possible. Oliver replies that there is still a lot that we don’t know about quantum information and “the quantum theory of multiple worlds has been around for the last half century” (395). Haruki #2 may have “figured out how to build his Q-Mu and get objects in that world to interact with this one” (395). When Ruth is confused, Oliver reminds her of Schrödinger’s Cat, the thought experiment for which their cat is named. Schrödinger proposed a scenario in which a cat in a box could be simultaneously dead and alive until the moment when it is observed. Oliver explains that some people have interpreted this to mean that the cat simultaneously exists in two different worlds—one in which it is alive and one in which it is dead. There could therefore be multiple worlds in which events in their lives and the lives of Nao and her family turn out differently. Oliver then asks her if she is happy with him and in this world. Ruth replies: “Yes, I suppose I am. At least for now” (401).

The Epilogue begins: “You wonder about me. I wonder about you” (401). It soon becomes clear that Ruth is writing the epilogue to Nao. She writes: “I picture you now, a young woman of…twenty-six? Twenty-seven? [...]Maybe in Tokyo. Maybe in Paris in a real French café, looking up from your page while you search for a word […] Wherever you are, I know you are writing” (402). The narrator writes that she suspects Nao is now in graduate school, “studying history, writing your dissertation on women anarchists in the Taisho Democracy, or the Instability of the Female ‘I’” (402). Ruth admits that she doesn’t know why she is writing since she knows that Nao does not want to be found. However, Ruth continues: “[I]f you ever change your mind and decide you’d like to be found, I’ll be waiting […] You’re my kind of time being, too” (403). She signs the epilogue “Yours, Ruth” (403).