zen<3lofi on Nostr: Last night I reread the ending of A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. I had ...

Last night I reread the ending of A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. I had forgotten how the plot had been resolved… It was a complex braiding of different people’s feelings and their choices and actions. To put it simply, it involved Ruth in the present time, and Nao in a past time (but it also involved Nao’s great-grandma in a dream). The emotions hit differently this time for me. The last time I read this book was before my own grandma died. Reading the ending, where Nao’s great-grandma is dying, and how before she did, she encouraged Nao and her dad to live (生) … was suddenly way more emotional for me then the last time I read it. That time, years ago, I suppose the feeling was like, ‘yes, this makes sense. This is one of the puzzle pieces that resolves things.’ Sad, but satisfying.

I woke up this morning with this chorus section in my head, “Hold onto hope if you got it. Don’t let it go for nobody. They say that dreaming is free. I wouldn’t care what it cost me.” I couldn’t place it at first, like ‘ooh this is a familiar song, but who is it by?’ (It’s the song ‘26’ by Hayley Williams of Paramore)

Oh, I just noticed a funny connection. Towards the end of the story, Ruth and her husband Oliver have realized that currently, in their present time, Nao is not 16 anymore, but probably around 26 or 27 years old.

Connecting these two works, the ‘hope’ in the song refers to how at the end of the story, even though Nao’s personal story has resolved for Ruth, she still doesn’t know what has happened with her, since Nao lived in Japan, during the year 2011, when the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami happened, which then also led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

So the book ends with Ruth writing a letter back to Nao. Earlier, she and her husband had realized that somehow, by believing in Nao and what she wrote ‘to them’ in her diary, they were actually causing the diary to continue to a conclusion, rather than ending abruptly. And their belief in Nao, somehow resonated back towards themselves. So even though Ruth has no way of knowing if Nao had died along with so many others in the tsunami, she wrote her a letter, hoping that her belief in her still carries meaning.