A Tale for the Time Being

Okay, my dear old Jiko. I’ll start right here at Fifi’s Lovely Apron. Fifi’s is one of a bunch of maid cafés that popped up all over Akiba Electricity Town¹¹ a couple of years ago, but what makes Fifi’s a little bit special is the French salon theme. The interior is decorated mostly in pink and red, with accents of gold and ebony and ivory. The tables are round and cozy, with marblelike tops and legs that look like carved mahogany, and the matching chairs have pink puff tapestry seats. Dark red velvet roses curl up the wallpaper, and the windows are draped in satin. The ceiling is gilded and hung with crystal chandeliers, and little naked Kewpie dolls float like clouds in the corners. There’s an entryway and coatroom with a trickling fountain and a statue of a nude lady lit by a throbbing red spot.

I don’t know if this decor is authentic or not as I’ve never visited France, but I’m going to guess that probably there aren’t many French maid cafés like this in Paris. It doesn’t matter. The feeling at Fifi’s Lovely Apron is very chic and intimate, like being stuffed inside a great big claustrophobic valentine, and the maids, with their pushed-up breasts and frilly uniforms, look like cute little valentines, too.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty empty in here right now, except for some otaku¹² types at the corner table, and two bug-eyed American tourists. The maids are standing in a sulky line, picking at the lace on their petticoats and looking bored and disappointed with us, like they’re hoping for some new and better customers to come in and liven things up. There was a little bit of excitement a while ago when one otaku ordered omurice¹³ with a big red Hello Kitty face painted in ketchup on top. A maid whose name tag says she’s Mimi knelt down before him to feed him, blowing on each bite before spooning it into his mouth. The Americans got a real kick out of that, which was hilarious. I wish you could have seen it. But then he finished, and Mimi took his dirty plate away, and now it’s boring again. The Americans are just drinking coffees. The husband is trying to get his wife to let him order a Hello Kitty omurice, too, but she’s way too uptight. I heard her whispering that the omurice is too expensive, and she’s got a point. The food here is a total rip-off, but I get my coffee for free because Babette is my friend. I’ll let you know if the wife loosens up and changes her mind.

It didn’t used to be this way. Back when maid cafés were ninki #1!¹⁴ Babette told me that the customers used to line up and wait for hours just to get a table, and the maids were all the prettiest girls in Tokyo, and you could hear them over the noise of Electricity Town calling out, Okaerinasaimase, dannasama!,¹⁵ which makes men feel rich and important. But now the fad is over and maids are no longer it, and the only customers are tourists from abroad, and otaku¹⁶ from the countryside, or sad hentai with out-of-date fetishes for maids. And the maids, too, are not so pretty or cute anymore, since you can make a lot more money being a nurse at a medical café or a fuzzy plushy in Bedtown.¹⁷ French maids are downward trending for sure, and everyone knows this, so nobody’s bothering to try very hard. You could say it’s a depressing ambience, but personally, I find it relaxing exactly because nobody’s trying too hard. What’s depressing is when everyone is trying too hard, and the most depressing thing of all is when they’re trying too hard and actually thinking that they’re making it. I’m sure that’s what it used to be like around here, with all the cheerful jangle of bells and laughing, and lines of customers around the block, and cute little maids sucking up to the café owners, who slouched around in their designer sunglasses and vintage Levi’s like dark princes or game-empire moguls. Those dudes had a long, long way to fall.

So I don’t mind this at all. I kind of like it because I know I can always get a table here at Fifi’s Lovely Apron, and the music is okay, and the maids know me now and usually leave me alone. Maybe it should be called Fifi’s Lonely Apron. Hey, that’s good! I like that!

My old Jiko really likes it when I tell her lots of details about modern life. She doesn’t get out very much anymore because she lives in a temple in the mountains in the middle of nowhere and has renounced the world, and also there’s the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that’s her age, but actually I’m just guessing. We don’t really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn’t remember, either. When you ask her, she says,

And if you pester her some more and ask her how long she’s been alive, she says,

All we know for sure is that there’s nobody older than her who remembers, and the family register at the ward office got burned up in a firebombing during World War II, so basically we have to take her word for it. A couple of years ago, she kind of got fixated on a hundred and four, and that’s what it’s been ever since.

And as I was saying, my old Jiko really likes detail, and she likes it when I tell her about all the little sounds and smells and colors and lights and advertising and people and fashions and newspaper headlines that make up the noisy ocean of Tokyo, which is why I’ve trained myself to notice and remember. I tell her everything, about cultural trends and news items I read about high school girls who get raped and suffocated with plastic bags in love hotels. You can tell Granny all that kind of stuff and she doesn’t mind. I don’t mean it makes her happy. She’s not a hentai. But she understands that shit happens, and she just sits there and listens and nods her head and counts the beads on her juzu,²⁰ saying blessings for those poor high school girls and the perverts and all the beings who are suffering in the world. She’s a nun, so that’s her job. I swear, sometimes I think the main reason she’s still alive is because of all the stuff I give her to pray about.

I asked her once why she liked to hear stories like this, and she explained to me that when she got ordained, she shaved her head and took some vows to be a bosatsu.²¹ One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first. It’s kind of like letting everybody else get into the elevator ahead of you. When you calculate all the beings on this earth at any time, and then add in the ones that are getting born every second and the ones that have already died—and not just human beings, either, but all the animals and other life-forms like amoebas and viruses and maybe even plants that have ever lived or ever will live, as well as all the extinct species—well, you can see that enlightenment will take a very long time. And what if the elevator gets full and the doors slam shut and you’re still standing outside?

When I asked Granny about this, she rubbed her shiny bald head and said, “Soo desu ne. It is a very big elevator . . .”

But she just smacked her lips and clicked her juzu beads, and the way she looked at me through those thick black-framed glasses of hers, I think maybe she was saying a blessing for me just then, too. I didn’t mind. It made me feel safe, like I knew no matter what happened, Granny was going to make sure I got onto that elevator.

You know what? Just this second, as I was writing this, I realized something. I never asked her where that elevator is going. I’m going to text her now and ask. I’ll let you know what she says.

Okay, so now I really am going to tell you about the fascinating life of Yasutani Jiko, the famous anarchist-feminist-novelist-turned-Buddhist-nun of the Taisho era, but first I need to explain about this book you’re holding.²² You’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t look like an ordinary schoolgirl’s pure diary with puffy marshmallow animals on a shiny pink cover, and a heart-shaped lock, and a little golden key. And when you first picked it up, you probably didn’t think, Oh, here’s a nice pure diary written by an interesting Japanese schoolgirl. Gee, I think I’ll read that! because when you picked it up, you thought it was a philosophical masterpiece called À la recherche du temps perdu by the famous French author named Marcel Proust, and not an insignificant diary by a nobody named Nao Yasutani. So it just goes to show that it’s true what they say: You can’t tell a book by its cover!²³

I hope you’re not too disappointed. What happened is that Marcel Proust’s book got hacked, only I didn’t do it. I bought it this way, prehacked, at a little handicraft boutique over in Harajuku²⁴ where they sell one-of-a-kind DIY goods like crochet scarves and keitai pouches and beaded cuffs and other cool stuff. Handicraft is a superbig fad in Japan, and everyone is knitting and beading and crocheting and making pepakura,²⁵ but I’m quite clumsy so I have to buy my DIY goods if I want to keep up with the trend. The girl who makes these diaries is a superfamous crafter, who buys containerloads of old books from all over the world, and then neatly cuts out all the printed pages and puts in blank paper instead. She does it so authentically you don’t even notice the hack, and you almost think that the letters just slipped off the pages and fell to the floor like a pile of dead ants.

Recently some nasty stuff has been happening in my life, and the day I bought the diary, I was skipping school and feeling especially blue, so I decided to go shopping in Harajuku to cheer myself up. When I saw these old books on the shelf, I thought they were a shop display so I didn’t pay any attention to them, but when the salesgirl pointed out the hack to me, of course I had to have one immediately. And they weren’t cheap, either, but I loved the worn feeling of the cover, and I could tell it would feel so good to write inside, like a real published book. But best of all, I knew it would be an excellent security feature.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this problem of people beating you up and stealing things from you and using them against you, but if you have, then you’ll understand that this book was total genius, in case one of my stupid classmates decided to casually pick up my diary and read it and post it to the Internet or something. But who would pick up an old book called À la recherche du temps perdu, right? My stupid classmates would just think it was homework for juku.²⁶ They wouldn’t even know what it meant.

Actually, I didn’t know what it meant either, since my ability to speak French is nonexistent. There were a bunch of books with different titles for sale. Some of them were in English, like Great Expectations and Gulliver’s Travels, which were okay, but I thought it would be better to buy a title I couldn’t read, since knowing the meaning might possibly interfere with my own creative expression. There were others in different languages, too, like German and Russian and even Chinese, but I ended up choosing À la recherche du temps perdu because I figured it was probably French, and French is cool and has a sophisticated feeling, and besides, this book is exactly the right size to fit into my handbag.

The minute I bought the book, of course, I wanted to start writing in it, so I went to a nearby kissa²⁷ and ordered a Blue Mountain, then I took out my favorite purple gel ink pen and opened the book to the first creamy page. I took a bitter sip and waited for the words to come. I waited and waited, and sipped some more coffee, and waited some more. Nothing. I’m pretty chatty, as you can probably tell, and usually I don’t have any trouble coming up with stuff to say. But this time, even though I had a lot on my mind, the words didn’t come. It was weird, but I figured I was just feeling intimidated by the new-old book and would eventually get over it. So I drank the rest of my coffee and read a couple of manga, and when it was time for school to let out, I went home.

But the next day I tried again, and the same thing happened. And after that, every time I took out the book, I’d stare at the title and start to wonder. I mean, Marcel Proust must be pretty important if even someone like me had heard of him, even if I didn’t know who he was at first and thought he was a celebrity chef or a French fashion designer. What if his ghost was still clinging to the inside of the covers and was pissed off at the hack the crafty girl had done, cutting out his words and pages? And what if now the ghost was preventing me from using his famous book to write about typical dumb schoolgirl stuff, like my crushes on boys (not that I have any), or new fashions I want (my desires are endless), or my fat thighs (actually my thighs are fine, it’s my knees I hate). You really can’t blame old Marcel’s ghost for getting righteously pissed off, thinking I might be dumb enough to write this kind of stupid crap inside his important book.

And even if his ghost didn’t mind, I still wouldn’t want to use his book for such trivial stuff, even if these weren’t my last days on earth. But since these are my last days on earth, I want to write something important, too. Well, maybe not important, because I don’t know anything important, but something worthwhile. I want to leave something real behind.

But what can I write about that’s real? Sure, I can write about all the bad shit that’s happened to me, and my feelings about my dad and my mom and my so-called friends, but I don’t particularly want to. Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I’m just wasting my time, and I’m not the only one. Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy.

And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?

And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.

So anyway, these distracting thoughts about ghosts and time kept drifting through my mind every time I tried to write in old Marcel’s book, until finally I decided that I had to know what the title meant. I asked Babette, but she couldn’t help me because of course she’s not a real French maid, just a high school dropout from Chiba prefecture, and the only French she knows is a couple of sexy phrases she picked up from this farty old French professor she was dating for a while. So when I got home that night, I googled Marcel Proust and learned that À la recherche du temps perdu means “In search of lost time.”

Weird, right? I mean, there I was, sitting in a French maid café in Akiba, thinking about lost time, and old Marcel Proust was sitting in France a hundred years ago, writing a whole book about the exact same subject. So maybe his ghost was lingering between the covers and hacking into my mind, or maybe it was just a crazy coincidence, but either way, how cool is that? I think coincidences are cool, even if they don’t mean anything, and who knows? Maybe they do! I’m not saying everything happens for a reason. It was more just that it felt as if me and old Marcel were on the same wavelength.

The next day I went back to Fifi’s and ordered a small pot of lapsang souchong, which I drink sometimes as a break from Blue Mountain, and as I sat there, sipping the smoky tea and nibbling a French pastry, waiting for Babette to set me up on a date, I started to wonder.

How do you search for lost time, anyway? It’s an interesting question, so I texted it to old Jiko, which is what I always do when I have a philosophical dilemma. And then I had to wait for a really, really long time, but finally my keitai gave a little ping that tells me she’s texted me back. And what she wrote was this:

²⁸

For the time being,

Words scatter . . .

Are they fallen leaves?

I’m not very good at poetry, but when I read old Jiko’s poem, I saw an image in my mind of this big old ginkgo tree on the grounds of her temple.²⁹ The leaves are shaped like little green fans, and in the autumn they turn bright yellow and fall off and cover the ground, painting everything pure golden. And it occurred to me that the big old tree is a time being, and Jiko is a time being, too, and I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree, sifting through the fallen leaves that are her scattered golden words.

The idea of the time being comes from a book called Shōbōgenzō that an ancient Zen master named Dōgen Zenji wrote about eight hundred years ago, which makes him even older than old Jiko or even Marcel Proust. Dōgen Zenji is one of Jiko’s favorite authors, and he’s lucky because his books are important and still kicking around. Unfortunately, everything Jiko wrote is out of print so I’ve actually never read her words, but she’s told me lots of stories, and I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too, and that’s when the idea popped into my mind of using Marcel Proust’s important book to write down my old Jiko’s life.

It’s not just because Jiko is the most important person I know, although that’s part of it. And it’s not just because she is incredibly old and was alive back when Marcel Proust was writing his book about time. Maybe she was, but that’s not why, either. The reason I decided to write about her in À la recherche du temps perdu is because she is the only person I know who really understands time.

Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she’s just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she’ll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so you know she is telling you a joke. I mean, she understands perfectly well that time isn’t something you can spread out like butter or jam, and death isn’t going to hang around and wait for you to finish whatever you happen to be doing before it zaps you. That’s the joke, and she laughs because she knows it.

But actually, I don’t think it’s very funny. Even though I don’t know old Jiko’s exact age, I do know for sure that pretty soon she’ll be dead even if she hasn’t finished sweeping out the temple kitchen or weeding the daikon patch or arranging fresh flowers on the altar, and once she’s dead, that will be the end of her, timewise. This doesn’t bother her at all, but it bothers me a lot. These are old Jiko’s last days on earth, and there’s nothing I can do about that, and there’s nothing I can do to stop time from passing or even to slow it down, and every second of the day is another second lost. She probably wouldn’t agree with me, but that’s how I see it.

I don’t mind thinking of the world without me because I’m unexceptional, but I hate the idea of the world without old Jiko. She’s totally unique and special, like the last Galapagos tortoise or some other ancient animal hobbling around on the scorched earth, who is the only one left of its kind. But please don’t get me going on the topic of species extinction because it’s totally depressing, and I’ll have to commit suicide right this second.

This is a problem. The only reason I can think of for writing Jiko’s life story in this book is because I love her and want to remember her, but I’m not planning on sticking around for long, and I can’t remember her stories if I’m dead, right?

And apart from me, who else would care? I mean, if I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I’d post her stories on a blog, but actually I stopped doing that a while ago. It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.³⁰ And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting,³¹ it kind of broke my heart.

The fact is, I don’t have much of a social network these days, and the people I hang out with aren’t the kind who care about a hundred-and-four-year-old Buddhist nun, even if she is a bosatsu who can use email and texting, and that’s only because I made her buy a computer so she could stay in touch with me when I’m in Tokyo and she’s at her falling-down old temple on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. She’s not crazy about new technology, but she does pretty well for a time being with cataracts and arthritis in both her thumbs. Old Jiko and Marcel Proust come from a prewired world, which is a time that’s totally lost these days.

So here I am, at Fifi’s Lonely Apron, staring at all these blank pages and asking myself why I’m bothering, when suddenly an amazing idea knocks me over. Ready? Here it is:

I will write down everything I know about Jiko’s life in Marcel’s book, and when I’m done, I’ll just leave it somewhere, and you will find it!

How cool is that? It feels like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me!

If you ask me, it’s fantastically cool and beautiful. It’s like a message in a bottle, cast out onto the ocean of time and space. Totally personal, and real, too, right out of old Jiko’s and Marcel’s prewired world. It’s the opposite of a blog. It’s an antiblog, because it’s meant for only one special person, and that person is you. And if you’ve read this far, you probably understand what I mean. Do you understand? Do you feel special yet?

Just kidding. I know you can’t answer, and now I feel stupid, because what if you don’t feel special? I’m making an assumption, right? What if you just think I’m a jerk and toss me into the garbage, like all those young girls I tell old Jiko about, who get killed by perverts and chopped up and thrown into dumpsters, just because they’ve made the mistake of dating the wrong guy? That would be really sad and scary.

Or, here’s another scary thought, what if you’re not reading this at all? What if you never even found this book, because somebody chucked it in the trash or recycled it before it got to you? Then old Jiko’s stories truly will be lost forever, and I’m just sitting here wasting time talking to the inside of a dumpster.

Okay, here’s what I’ve decided. I don’t mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting. And I don’t think old Jiko will mind, either, because being a Buddhist, she really understands impermanence and that everything changes and nothing lasts forever. Old Jiko really isn’t going to care if her life stories get written or lost, and maybe I’ve picked up a little of that laissez-faire attitude from her. When the time comes, I can just let it all go.

Or not. I don’t know. Maybe by the time I’ve written the last page, I’ll be too embarrassed or ashamed to leave it lying around, and I’ll wimp out and destroy it instead.

And as for that business about old Marcel’s ghost being pissed off, I’ve decided not to worry about it. When I was googling Marcel Proust, I happened to look up his sales ranking on Amazon, and I couldn’t believe it but his books are all still in print, and depending on which edition of À la recherche du temps perdu you’re talking about, his ranking is somewhere between 13,695 and 79,324, which is no best seller, but it’s not so bad for a dead guy. Just so you know. You don’t have to feel too sorry for old Marcel.

I don’t know how long this whole project is going to take me. Probably months. There are lots of blank pages, and Jiko’s got lots of stories, and I write pretty slow, but I’m going to work really hard, and probably by the time I’m done filling in the last page, old Jiko will be dead, and it will be my time, too.

And I know I can’t possibly write down every detail about Jiko’s life, so if you want to learn more, you’ll have to read her books, if you can find them. Like I said before, her stuff is all out of print, and it’s possible that some crafty girl has already hacked her pages and tossed all her golden words into the recycling bin next to Proust’s. That would be really sad, because it’s not like old Jiko has any ranking on Amazon at all. I know because I checked and she isn’t even there. Hmm. I’m going to have to rethink this hacking concept. Maybe it’s not so cool after all.